While deploying a vCloud Director cell and logging into the VAMI interface of the appliance (https://<hostname>:5480) for the first time, you might see an error saying:
OS Configuration Phase has failed.
Please check the log at /opt/vmware/var/log/firstboot for more details on the failure before redeploying this appliance node.
For reference, this is what one expects to see if all goes well:
When checked, the “firstboot” file has the following lines towards the end of it:
Updating /etc/hosts file …
System hostname is: photon-machine
[ERROR] Hostname was not updated via dns reverse-lookup. Failing OS configuration phase.
[ERROR] Fix and verify DNS server info and other related networking settings, and redeploy this appliance again.
I recently saw this issue during a vCloud Director 10.2.2 appliance deployment, although looking at this thread, it seems people have seen this with 10.2 as well.
Now as the error suggested and the fact that every world problem is caused by bad DNS (until it’s networking!), it was checked multiple times i.e. forward and reverse lookups, short and FQDN – the works! All name resolution seemed OK. The attention then moved on to networking but nothing was shown to be dropped in the traffic flows, which turned this into a real headscratcher.
However, after spending some time, it was discovered that at a particular part of the DNS resolution path, TCP 53 was not allowed. That was quickly fixed and once enabled, the problem was resolved.
It was an annoying oversight that wasted some time but is a good reminder to verify all ports/protocols throughout the traffic paths, before deploying any piece of infrastructure – not just vCloud Director. For reference, here are the Network Security Requirements for vCloud Director specifically.
It was quite funny too as…
- It was DNS…
- then it was not DNS…
- but it was indeed DNS!
… or was it networking? You decide!
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