This week I was having some trouble with vSphere Replication appliances in my lab and decided to rip apart my replication setup. I logined to my VR appliance VAMI address and unregistered VRMS from vCenter Server. Deleted my replication appliance in order to deploy it from scratch.

To my surprise vSphere Replication plugin was still present in my vCenter Server, even after I logged out and logged in back to webclient.

I tried to reboot my vCenter Server to see if it clears the plugin, but that trick didn’t worked for me.

Now the only option left was to uninstall the plugin was using vSphere MOB. If you are like me and dont know much about MOB then I would recommend reading this blogpost.

I followed following steps to successfully remove replication plugin from my vCenter Server.

1; Open your favourite browser and point it to URL https://vCenter-FQDN/mob and login.

2: Click on content.

3: Click on Extension Manager to open list of installed plugins.

4: Search and click on the plugin you want to uninstall. The name for vSphere replication plugin is com.vmware.vcHMS. I was not sure if it is the right plugin (however since VR applaince has HMS service running inside it, it gave me a clue).

5: If you are unsure about if the selected plugin is correct or not, right click on it and open it in new tab. Click on description and you will see from where this plugin is coming from. As you can see in below screenshot it shows “VR Management”, so yeah my guess was right.

6:  After clicking on plugin which you want to uninstall, note down the plugin key id which will be used to remove the plugin:

7: Now return to previous page and locate “Unregister Extension” and click on that option.

A new window will be launched. Enter the plugin key id which we noted in step 6 and click on the “Invoke Method” to remove the plugin.

Now the plugin has been uninstalled. If you are still login’ed to webclient then logoff and log back in to confirm plugin has disappeared from vCenter. In rare case restart of web-client is required for changes to take effect. Fortunately in my case logoff and login just worked fine. I was no longer seeing vSphere Replication plugin.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing. Be sociable