VMware SDDC – Converged, Hyperconverged Infrastructure & Virtualization

SDDC Manager 3.x [3.11.x] Issues & Solutions

January 12, 2023Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

Hello All,

Recently I came across a few issues while preparing for an VCF Upgrade from 3.11.x version to 4.x in our environment.

Below are few of the issues and how to resolve them using commands on the SDDC Manager

Issue: SDDC Manager UI shows the message “Password Manager option failed in pre-validation stage” or when you go to the security tab for password management, it shows that one of the password tasks have failed.

Issue: Deployment locked by password manager when you try to rotate the passwords of PSC, VCENTER from the security -> password management tab

Solution/s:

Find the Deployment Lock ID in the sddc manager by logging into sddc manager using SSH, login as VCF and then root user and use the following command

psql --host=localhost -U postgres -d platform -c "select * from lock"

This will display the ID’s of the locked tasks in the SDDC Manager

Delete the locked task by using the following command

psql --host=localhost -U postgres -d platform -c "delete from lock where id=<ID displayed above>"

Once the task is deleted, the lock is released. You can now refresh the SDDC Manager UI and then continue with the password update or rotate options

Issue: Remove Failed Tasks in SDDC Manager

Solution:

Reference – https://www.martingustafsson.com/removing-failed-tasks-in-sddc-manager/

Multiple Useful Commands for SDDC 3.x

The Unofficial VCF Troubleshooting Guide v2 – https://www.lab2prod.com.au/2021/03/the-unofficial-vcf-troubleshooting-guide.html

Reference

MANAGING VMWARE CLOUD FOUNDATION – FIRST LOOK

Password Operation Failed to Change the SSO password on an external PSC in VCF 3.11

October 28, 2022October 28, 2022Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

Recently I came across an issue trying to change the SSO account (administrator@vsphere.local) password from the SDDC Manager using the Rotate password option under Security in VCF 3.11

I tried to Rotate the SSO password using the SDDC Manager, and got the following error:

However, Interesting thing is the sddc manager did change the SSO password in the backend

However, to check on this error, I dug a little deeper and saw the following error in the password rotate task:

I used the following command to check the operationsmanager.log to check the log in SDDC Manager

less /var/log/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/operationsmanager.log

The log also shows that the sddc manager is trying to change the sso credential (administrator@vsphere.local) on VRA endpoints

I had to open a VMware Support ticket and here is the answer I received:

“As per the Engineering team this issue is due to a misconfiguration of vRA endpoints. SDDC Manager is trying to change the administrator@vsphere.local on the VRA endpoints but VRA endpoints are configured with a different user (vcf-secured-user@vsphere.local). This issue is addressed in VCF 4.x”

What the VMware Engineering team is saying is that in VCF 3.10.x, 3.11 there is an issue with VRA as it is typically configured using a different tenant admin instead of using administrator@vsphere.local user to configure the endpoints in it. However, the SDDC manager is trying to change the administrator@vsphere.local credential on VRA endpoints. Hence this issue. Looks like this issue has been fixed in VCF 4.x

This resolves the issue at this time as we will be working to upgrade our VCF to 4.x soon.

Check for Passwords in SDDC Manager in VCF 3.x

July 22, 2022Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

Recently I had to check the existing passwords in sddc manager in our VCF 3.11 environment and found out there is a simple way. Here it is.

SSH into your SDDC Manager using vcf user and go to the root prompt using su command and use the below command:

root@sddcmgr01 [home/vcf]# lookup_passwords

Screenshot:

This will bring up all the products which sddc manager keeps track of

Select any product and then you will have to provide the sddc secured user credentials which you provided at the time of deploying SDDC manager in the VCF environment. This credential is also used for the backup of SDDC Manager and NSX Components.

in this case ESXI was selected to display the esxi hosts credentials

This way, you can get all the passwords for all the components controlled by SDDC Manager in VCF 3.x

NOTE/Disclaimer: I had to Blur/Pixelate certain components in my screenshots as they are in a live environment.

Great VCF Troubleshooting Guide by my Fellow vExpert

February 24, 2022Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

I wanted to ping back one of the great article by one of my fellow vExpert Shank Mohan on his website about an unofficial VCF Troubleshooting guide. I have learned from this article and would like to remember this article and hence posting it back on my blog.

The Unofficial VCF Troubleshooting Guide v2 | LAB2PROD

Great VCF Troubleshooting guide by Shank Mohan

LCM Directory Permission Error When pre-checking for SDDC Manager Upgrade with VCF 3.11 Patch

February 19, 2022Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

I was getting ready to patch our environment from VCF 3.10.2.2 to VCF 3.11 as VMware has officially released a complete Patch for VCF 3.10.x this month, when I was performing the VCF Upgrade Pre-Check for the Management Domain, I came across this issue

The LCM Pre-Check Failed due to a directory permission issue for one of the lcm directory

Issue is that the pre-check says that the directory “/var/log/vmare/vcf/lcm/upgrades/<long code directory>/lcmAbout” owner is root but the owner needs to be user vcf_lcm

This is how I resolved the issue:

then go to the following directory “/var/log/vmware/vcf/lcm/upgrades/<long code directory as displayed in the lcm error on sddc manager>

chown vcf_lcm lcmAbout
chmod 750 lcmAbout

The above two commands will change the owner from root to vcf_lcm and also provide the required permissions to the folder so the pre-check can complete.

The full screenshot of what I performed is below:

Commands to change owner to vcf_lcm and to provide the required permissions for the folder lcmAbout

Once you perform the commands above, you can run the pre-check and this time it will proceed successfully as shown below

Hope this article helps if you come across this issue with sddc manager upgrade from VCF 3.10.2.2 to 3.11

VCF 3.x patch 3.11 for Log4J Vulnerability and Other Security Patches included

February 17, 2022Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

VMware has finally realeased an patch version for VCF 3.x and the version is 3.11. You can only download this as a patch form from the SDDC Manager. You can Upgrade to version 3.11 from 30.10.2.2 or VCF 3.5 or later.

VMSA-2021-0028.13 (vmware.com)

This Release VCF 3.11 includes the following:

Security fixes for Apache Log4j Remote Code Execution Vulnerability: This release fixes CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046. See VMSA-2021-0028.
Security fixes for Apache HTTP Server: This release fixes CVE-2021-40438. See CVE-2021-40438.
Improvements to upgrade prechecks: Upgrade prechecks have been expanded to verify filesystem capacity, file permissions, and passwords. These improved prechecks help identify issues that you need to resolve to ensure a smooth upgrade.
This also resolves the following Security Advisory VMSA-2022-0004 which deals with several vulnerabilities in esxi 6.7 hosts
This also resolves the vulnerability in VCF SDDC Manager 3.x according to the security advisory VMSA-2022-0003
This version also addresses the heap-overflow vulnerability in esxi hosts according to the security advisory VMSA-2022-0001.2

The Updated product versions according to the BOM for VCF 3.11 are

Hope this post helps for the teams who have VCF 3.10.x and waiting for the long awaited log4j patch instead of an workaround.

Visio Diagrams for VMware Validated Design for SDDC 6.0

November 30, 2020Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

Looks like the new Visio diagrams and Stencils for VMware SDDC 6.0 are out at communities.vmware.com and created by the author Gary JBlake.

The link to download the diagrams is below:

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Documents/Visio-Diagrams-for-VMware-Validated-Design-for-SDDC-6-0/ta-p/2782683

This has been referenced from communities.vmware.com forum under VMTN > SDDC > VMware Validated Designs > Validated Designs for SDDC 6.x > Documents
https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Documents/Visio-Diagrams-for-VMware-Validated-Design-for-SDDC-6-0/ta-p/2782683

VRSLCM 2.1 Deploy Option Greyed Out in VCF 3.10.x

November 26, 2020Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

I recently came across an issue where the vRealize Life Cycle Manager 2.1 has the Deploy option greyed out in SDDC Manager in VCF 3.10.x and the issue looks like the screenshot below:

The issue happened as we were using VLAN Backed Network for vRealize products instead of AVN in this version of VCF

The solution is as follows:

Log in to SDDC Manager by using a secure shell (SSH) client, use the account vcf to login into SSH session
Type su to elevate to root and enter the root_password.
Enter the following and press enter.

cd /home/vcf
echo "feature.vrealize.enable.non.avn.deployments=true" >> feature.properties
chown vcf:vcf feature.properties
chmod 644 feature.properties
/opt/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/scripts/cli/sddcmanager_restart_services.sh

When prompted enter Y to confirm. vRealize Suite deployments using SDDC Manager will now be deployed to VLAN backed networks

This is taken from the VMware KB Article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/79267

Hope this helps if you are using VLAN Backed Network for vRealize Components when deploying a new VCF 3.10.x version in your environment.

VRA 7.6 with VCF 3.10.x SDDC Manager AD Error

November 25, 2020Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

I have recently come across an issue in our new VCF 3.10.x build that when we try to deploy the VRA using SDDC Manager, we get an error that the AD Account we have provided can’t validate with the Domain.

The warning is as shown in the picture below:

Note That I had to change a few details and also blur some details from my environment due to privacy reasons.

The Error basically states that VRA is not able to communicate to my domain lab.com with the service account lab\svc_vra_adm because it is trying to contact test.lab.com instead of lab.com Domain

test.lab.com is a DNS Zone in our actual root Domain lab.com and all our VRA Appliances have the host records added to test.lab.com instead of the root domain.

After multiple tries and VMware support, we got to know that VRA (7.x and 8.x) doesn’t support explicit identification of the Active Directory domain name. The kb article which mentions this issue is

htt ps://kb.vmware.com/s/article/59128

The Solution is to make sure that the host records of your VRA is the same as your ‘Actual‘ Domain, in this case lab.com and then retry the validation using the SDDC Manager with the same service account lab\svc_vra_adm

This time, the validation should pass.