vCenter unavailable after cloning

[Gabrie1]

Hi,

I'm testing the upgrade of vCenter 6.5 to 6.7 in a lab. Cloned my DC's, PSC appliance and 4 vCenter Server appliances connected to the PSC. When now starting the appliances in my testlab, the vCenter 5480 interface is accessible, but all services are down.

When I run "Service control --status", only lwsmd and vmafdd are running, all other services are down. IP has remained the same, name hasn't changed. Only thing that changed is the mac-address. Could this have triggered some certificate changes or becoming invalid?

[amohammadimir]

I faced the similar issue before with version 6, It was related to the changed MAC address, when you clone the vCenter Server Appliance a new MAC address wil be assigned to the cloned VCSA. It detects that as a new network adapter with without any configuration while the old network adapter is missing.

This KB helped me:

VMware Knowledge Base

[Gabrie1 · Accepted solution]

Change of Mac address was not the issue, network connectivity was working.

Turned out the more people had issues with restarting a vCenter appliance when a snapshot is reverted of a running VM, which a live clone essentially is.

If found the solution in this thread: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/563551

find /etc/systemd/system/ -lname '/dev/null' -exec ls {} \;

find /etc/systemd/system/ -lname '/dev/null' -exec rm {} \;

systemctl daemon-reload

service-control --start --all

Later also found this official doc:

Run the vcenter-restore Script