For a customer project I was today undertaking the task of migrating their SRM deployment from a Windows server running SRM 8.1 to the virtual appliance running 8.2.
The steps to perform this migration are included in the VMware documentation at https://docs.vmware.com/en/Site-Recovery-Manager/8.2/com.vmware.srm.install_config.doc/GUID-F39A84D3-2E3D-4018-97DD-5D7F7E041B43.html .Everything went smoothly for the in place upgrade to 8.2 on the Windows server and I was able to export the configuration ready for the migration.
Once the appliance was deployed and powered on I imported the Root CA server certificate following the documentation and then installed the CA signed server certificate via the VAMI.
When it came time to run the import of the content taken from the old server I encountered a problem. The customer has custom CA signed certificates on all servers including vCenter and the PSC. The import command was prompting me to enter the vCenter Certificate thumbprint. Viewing the certificate details in my browser I copied the thumprint value out to notepad++ replacing the spaces with colons and then copied it making sure there were no leading or trailing spaces into the command. A minute or to later it was failed with a generic error
*** Errors reported!!! Failed to configure SRM VA
*** Exit code 5
Checking for more details in the log file /var/log/vmware/srm/import-srm-data.log I discovered an error
msg = 'A general system error occurred: 22ConfigurationException Invalid thumbprint format.
A search of our internal slack channel for SRM didn’t highlight anything related and neither did a search of past SR and KB articles. Google didn’t find anything related to SRM for this error, it did suggest a VMware Communities post though https://communities.vmware.com/thread/558857 which contained a suggestion that there was an illegal character in the thumbprint value.
The value I had pasted into the command looked fine, however I followed the advice and manually entered the thumbprint using colons to separate the hexadecimal values. The command completed successfully so there must have been some characters not translating properly when I did the copy and paste.