When upgrading or reinstalling VMWare Site Recovery Manager (SRM), you may run into the following error:

Error message

Failed to Clear Inventory Service Registration

This error can occur when you attempt to upgrade/reinstall SRM, and have decided to clear out the SRM database, or when you have done a reinstall of vCenter, the inventory service, or have cleared out the Inventory Service database.

Solution

There are two ways around this.

• Keep the old SRM database instead of overwriting it, but after the installation, you will manually have to clean up the existing database, since you wanted to clear out the old data in the first place.
• Alternatively, and more easily done, is to remove the database before updating/reinstalling SRM.

In case of using SQL server, you can simply remove all tables, but leave the database itself intact, allowing you to reselect the DSN during the SRM install.

More information

An extended explanation about why this error occurs during the installation can be found here:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/09/srm-install-error-failed-clear-inventory-service-registration.html