vCloud Director - Cannot Prepare Hosts

[wrsuarez858]

I'm trying to Evaluate vCloud Director and it's not going well. I've been following the Evalutors guide to set up the environment but I must be missing something. My setup is as follows:

Main Lab

1 - Existing vSphere 5 environment with 5 ESXi hosts running several VM's

1 - vCloud Director Appliance

1 - vShield VM Appliance

2 - ESXi 5.0 Hosts running as VMs

1 - Standalone vSphere 5 Server managing the 2 ESX5.0 hosts running as VM's

1 - FreeNAS Server running a shared NFS storage location for the 2 ESX-5.0 VM hosts (50GB of storage)

vCloud Test Lab (inside of Main Lab)

1 - dvSwitch with both hosts attached (2nd NIC)

1 - Shared NFS Datastore

2 - ESXi 5.0 hosts (fully patched through update manager)

DRS - enabled, fully automated

HA - enabled

All of the vCloud specific components are running in evaluation mode for now. I've been able to get through all of the guide successfully until the part about creating a Provider vDC. The Datastore gets added, the network pool gets added, but the hosts refuse to prepare through vCloud director. I've done everything I can think of including rebooting the hosts and vCenter server. Watching the hosts in VCS they go into maint. mode and a second later exit maint mode so I know they aren't even attempting to install anything. I have full network connectivity between them and everything else. Everything is on the same network and VLAN so that shouldn't be an issue. What am I missing?

[wrsuarez858]

This is all I'm getting when I try to prepare the hosts:

Failures occurred during prepare of host "vcloudhost2".

- vcloudhost2

- vcloudhost2

Event [id=c1d546b3-7bd4-422b-b7fa-46520b52e3a1, timestamp=1339519956959, type=com/vmware/vcloud/event/task/complete, properties={

currentContext.org.name=System,

currentContext.user.id=administrator(com.vmware.vcloud.entity.user:c354e6a2-0a27-4dd7-982f-bf50307965b2),

entity.type=com.vmware.vcloud.entity.task,

currentContext.login.user.id=com.vmware.vcloud.entity.user:c354e6a2-0a27-4dd7-982f-bf50307965b2,

currentContext.user.name=administrator,

currentContext.login.member.id=administrator(com.vmware.vcloud.entity.user:6178c37c-355a-4daf-a2eb-de956a5c345d),

task.ownerId=fee0535c-d12f-4bce-9104-29ce718708eb,

currentContext.org.id=System(com.vmware.vcloud.entity.org:a93c9db9-7471-3192-8d09-a8f7eeda85f9),

currentContext.success=false,

currentContext.login.org.id=com.vmware.vcloud.entity.org:a93c9db9-7471-3192-8d09-a8f7eeda85f9,

task.ownerType=com.vmware.vcloud.entity.host,

currentContext.user.clientIpAddress=,

task.name=RCL_PREPARE_HOST,

entity.name=RCL_PREPARE_HOST,

currentContext.user.proxyAddress=,

currentContext.cell.uuid=7b01b185-a870-42e4-b9ce-3a7a8b94170d,

entity.id=RCL_PREPARE_HOST(com.vmware.vcloud.entity.task:68b1d1df-f580-46b6-9d9b-ee66f171d7a8),

}]

[tsugliani]

Hi, I would verify those 2 things first :

Do you have a proper DNS configuration in your lab ? (Like the vCloud Cell being able to resolve your ESXi hostnames ?)

And second, if you can attach this file from the vCloud Cell : /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-debug.log

(you can use tail -f /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-debug.log) during the Prepare host operation, and try to catch the error :-), beware it's pretty verbose)

This would help us pinpoint you in the right direction.

Regards,

[wrsuarez858]

Being a lab environment our DNS resolution is a little sketchy to be honest with you. But I do have the hosts statically set in the hosts file on the vCenter server. is there a way to do this on the vCloud Director appliance?

[tsugliani]

Well as it's a lab environment, you can edit the /etc/hosts file on the appliance to achieve the same result 🙂 (unsupported)

[wrsuarez858]

Yup was already into that when I got this. I had the same thought. That did the trick! Thank you!