I have been playing with VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 in my lab and I ran across a setup problem that I thought I would share.
More information on VMware SRM can be found here: http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager/. But a very high level description is that SRM, in addition to storage replication, automates the failover of VMs between datacenters.
SRM is a VMware product however it requires a storage vendor developed plug-in, called a Site Replication Adapter (SRA), to fully function. The SRA provides an interface to the back-end storage, allowing SRM to control failover.
The SRA is developed by IBM however it is available (and should be downloaded) from the VMware website. This ensures you are getting the correct version of the SRA for the version of SRM being downloaded. If you happen to need an older version of the SRA, you can download it from this site ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/storage/ds_open_api/VMWARE/SVC_SRA/.
So onto the issue I experienced…
While trying to setup the Array Managers in SRM I was receiving this error: “Failed to load SRA from ‘C:/Program Files (x86)/VMware/VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager/storage/sra/IBMSVC’. SRA command ‘queryInfo’ didn’t return a response.”
This was a frustrating problem for me with a simple solution. The IBM SRA communicates with the back-end storage by utilizing pearl scripts. The ‘queryInfo’ script was failing simply because my SRM server did not have Pearl installed. After installing Active Pearl (http://www.activestate.com/activeperl) my environment is working.
The pre-req of Active Pearl is not listed in the guide that accompanies the IBM SRA.
virtualstoragespeak 
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Hi
Excellent articles. Does this requirement for active perl apply to the SRA for SRM 4.1?
Cheers
David
Hi David,
The key is to have environmental path variables to installed Pearl binaries. Installing Active Pearl does this for you so I found it to be a simple method. All versions of the SRA should require this.
Hi, thanks for sharing this very usefull info. Just implementing new v7000 systems with vSphere / SRM 5. I have win2008R2 which is 64 bits and SRM installs in the “Program Files (x86)” folder meaning it is a 32 bits program.
Which perl installation should I choose now? the 32 bits or the 64 bits version?
thanks, Peter.
I don’t think it will matter which version you install because Active Pearl will create an environmental variable for the path to the binaries.