[ESXi 6.7] Deploy OVF Template wizard: Ready to complete phase shows only placeholders

[susenj]

Experts,

I observed this issue on ESXi 6.7 while deploying an OVA(running an app on top of CentOS 7.3). The Ready to complete section doesn't seem to be fetching the right details(check screenshot below) and it looks like the GUI is just throwing the placeholder names instead of the correct values.

This is not recreate-able in every installation attempt, but getting it randomly is very annoying.

Sometimes in good lucky installation attempts, the window does appear carrying the right values(please check the Correct_completion.jpeg screenshot attached).

Please let me know what could have gone wrong. Should you need any more information, I would be glad to provide it.

Thanks in advance.

[Ardaneh]

Hi

We had the same issue, sometimes we couldn't see the labels for placeholders in our vCenter, so after searching and searching we figured it out that the problem is related to some files in vCenter itself. there are some files that map the labels to placeholders, and those files were corrupted, so we replaced them with fresh ones from another vCenter and the problem was solved.

The file name was catalog.zip and the path was /etc/vmware-vpx/locale/

I hope this could be helpful

[susenj]

Thanks for your response, Ardaneh​. I do understand it's some issue at the vcentre's side. Is it a known problem in vCenter(any registred bug etc) and do we at least know the root-cause of the file corruption?

Kind regards,

Neeraj

[Ardaneh]

No, it's not a known problem in VC, sometimes it just happens. it wasn't easy for us to find the problem, because it was some weird problem! so after tons of searches, we could find the solution to solve the problem, and I believe there is no KB for this problem (or at least I couldn't find any!)

I consider file corruption as a disk problem, so this can happen for almost every VM. it is inevitable, VC is but a VM with some files that provide functionality in your virtualization environment, so this kind of issue can happen to the VC as well.

Regards