Ok the upgrade was like a migration. Deploying the OVF, and upon power on choosing the upgrade option and filling out all the details.
It turns out the hbr (guid) disk was invalid so to fix this is the step that has to be done for each vm. I have 29 replicated VM's.
On destination site rename the folder the VM is replicating to. For example vm.old.
On protected site disable the replication for the VM.
On destination site rename the folder the VM was replicating to back to its original name. For example vm.
On protected site create a new replication, browse and use the seed disks at the destination site.
I got through 16 of 29 of these, but now I'm getting a java socket timed out. I think the replication appliance is just overwhelmed with traffic. I usually throttle the ports on the switch at 60mbps (out of 100mbps pipe) for vsphere replication ports, but I changed it to 90mbps to give it more time.
Back story:
Friday upgraded both sites, but protected site did not work.
VMWare support finally got back to me Monday. Struggled but got them some logs.
VMware support suggested trying the upgrade again monday afternoon.
Tuesday morning on protected site, powered off new appliance and tried upgrade again. This time sucessful.
Everything connected and paired... just replications not working.
VMware support suggested the faulty upgrade that they see from time to time may have messed up hbr disks.
First they tried deleting the hbr disks, just leaving the base disk. Did not work.
Next they did the procedure I did above and it worked, so instructed me to do the same.
So a little over half are in the "initial seed" and I'll keep trying every few hours to get the last few back on. I'm now seeing bandwidth usage on the WAN links, and when I dive deeper its from the ESXi servers, so it is progressing slowly.
Next I need to upgrade SRM. Traditionally SRM has been installed on our Windows vCenter servers. But soon we want to migrate those vcenter servers to the VCSA and do an upgrade from 6.0 to 6.7. Does vmware have a Photon OS based virtual appliance (OVF) to deploy for SRM? If the move away from Windows as the OS behind some of these vmware components is the goal, what is the solution for SRM?