ASR replication appliance, IIS, and Certificate

AdamTyler-3590 275 Reputation points
2024-03-29T17:56:03.5433333+00:00

Hello. I am in the process of deploying Azure Site Recovery between our on-prem VMware environment and Azure. I've deployed the ASR replication appliance a few times now as I test different options and behavior. One thing I always try and do is set the hostname of a VM in our on-prem environment to match the VMware VM name. So the guest OS and the VMware label match essentially.

For example, when I deploy the OVF into our VMware environment, the VM name might be "DCREPL001". When the VM is booted and you start interacting with the guest OS, the Windows hostname is set to something generic, "WIN-F2T73B5CNH1".

I was able to rename the Windows guest OS and things seem to work. However, I notice I am getting a cert error when I launch the web based "Azure Appliance Configuration Manager" app. The certificate appears to be hard coded to the old hostname. The cert error on launch doesn't bother me, but I am starting to wonder if renaming the guest OS on these Appliances is supported? The guest appears to use IIS and the certificate looks something like this.. Can the cert be regenerated with the new hostname or is this best left at the default guest OS name?

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Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery
An Azure native disaster recovery service. Previously known as Microsoft Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager.
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  1. Monalla-MSFT 12,766 Reputation points
    2024-04-01T02:48:27.3+00:00

    @AdamTyler-3590 - Welcome to Microsoft Q&A and thanks for reaching out to us.

    AFAIK renaming the guest OS on the ASR replication appliance is not a supported scenario and can cause issues with the certificate validation used by the Azure Appliance Configuration Manager. The certificate is tied to the original hostname of the appliance, and renaming the guest OS can cause issues with the certificate validation.

    To avoid any potential issues, it is recommended to leave the hostname of the ASR replication appliance as the default guest OS name. If you need to identify the appliance in the Azure portal, you can use a friendly name to track it in the Azure portal under recovery services vault infrastructure.

    If you have already renamed the guest OS and are experiencing issues with the certificate validation, you can try regenerating the certificate with the new hostname by clicking on Regenerate button under certificates tab in Azure Applicance configuration Manager.

    Note that regenerating the certificate may cause some downtime for the ASR replication appliance, so it is recommended to do this during a maintenance window

    Hope this helps. and please feel free to reach out if you have any further questions.

    Please don't forget to "Accept as Answer" and click "Yes" if the above response is helpful, so it can be beneficial to the community.

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