After upgrade to vCenter 5.5 Update3b on the appliance, SRM no longer works - How to fix it!

You have upgraded to vCenter 5.5 Update3b on the VMware appliance and SRM has stopped working.  You know this is because of SSLv3 (you have read the upgrade notes after all!) - but you need to upgrade because of updates and security etc - but you can't upgrade to vCenter 6 as your backup product does not support vCenter 6 - what can you do?

You can still upgrade!

Upgrade as you would normally and the vCenter replication will still continue but your SRM management will fail.  You will use the vSphere client and you will get error messages saying it cannot communicate with the SRM server.  If you try to install, modify, upgrade your installation on the SRM server you will get this error message.

Internal error: unexpected error code: -1

Fortunately, this knowledge base article 2139396 (from VMWare has the answer contained within it - but which option should you use?  It's the VMware Virtual Center Server (vpxd) - Port 443 option.

VMware Virtual Center Server (vpxd) - Port 443

To enable SSLv3:

1. Open the vpxd.cfg file:
   
   
   • Windows default location: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\vpxd.cfg
   • vCenter Server Appliance default location: /etc/vmware-vpx/vpxd.cfg
     
2. Create a backup copy of the file.
   
3. Edit the file to add or remove <sslOptions>16924672</sslOptions> to enable or disable SSLv3 respectively:
   
   <vmacore>
   <cacheProperties>true</cacheProperties>
   <ssl>
   <useCompression>true</useCompression>
   <sslOptions>16924672</sslOptions>
   </ssl>
   <threadPool>
   <TaskMax>90</TaskMax>
   <threadNamePrefix>vpxd</threadNamePrefix>
   </threadPool>
   </vmacore>
   
4. Save the file.
   
5. Restart the vpxd Service.     - Do this by typing in   service vmware-vpxd restart
   
6. To disable SSLv3, ensure that the sslOptions is not set in the vpxd.cfg file.