I needed to do some validation around vRealize Operations Manager & vRealize Orchestrator for an upcoming VVD release and a physical lab environment was made available. The environment is a dual region VVD deployment. Upon verifying that I had access to all the components I needed it became obvious there was an issue with SSO in the primary region (SFO). Browsing to the web client for the SFO management vCenter I was seeing this:
As i mentioned this is a VVD deployment and per VVD guidelines there are 2 Platform Services Controllers (PSCs) behind an NSX load balancer per region. Like so: (Diagram from the VMware Validated Design 5.0 Architecture & Design guide)
Like any good (lazy!) IT person the first thing i did was google the error to find the quick fix! That led me to this communities post which had some suggestions around disk space etc. None of which were relevant to my issue. Running the following on the PSCs and vCenters showed that some services were not starting
service-control –status
Restarting the services didn’t help. Next up i checked the usual suspects:
- NTP
- DNS
- SSL Certificates
All of the above looked ok. Next I turned my attention to the load balancer. Because the vCenter Web Client was inaccessible I was not able to access the load balancer settings through the UI so I turned to the NSX API using Postman
To connect to the NSX manager that is associated with the load balancer you need to configure a Postman session with basic authentication and enter the NSX manager admin user & password.
To retrieve information on the load balancer you need to run the following GET:
https://sfo01m01nsx01.sfo01.rainpole.local/api/4.0/edges/edge-1/loadbalancer/config
I wont post the full response from the above command as it’s lengthy but scanning through it I noticed that the condition of each load balancer pool member was disabled. In the immortal words of Bart Simpson:
Now I dont know how it got into this state – maybe someone was doing some jenga style doomsday testing, pulling one brick at a time until the tower crashes! – but this certainly looked to be the cause of the issue. So I figured the quickest fix would be to do a PUT API call to NSX with condition enabled for the pool members and I’d be all set. Not so easy!
Running the following PUT appears to work temporarily (running a GET at the same time confirms this)
But the change does not get fully applied and reverts the conditions to disabled after about 30 seconds with the below error:
So to apply the change to the load balancer NSX requires a handoff with the PSC that is is mapped to…in this case its the load balanced PSC that is not functional. So the command fails.
So it was clear I needed to get at least 1 PSC operational before i could attempt to make a change. Time to play with some DNS redirects to “fool” the PSC services into starting.
As my PSCs are setup in HA mode behind a load balancer the SSO endpoint URL is https://sfo01psc01.sfo01.rainpole.local which both PSCs will respond from. So to get my first PSC up I changed the IP for sfo01psc01.sfo01.rainpole.local in DNS to point to the first PSC’s IP.
So now, pings to the load balancer VIP FQDN sfo01psc01.sfo01.rainpole.local respond from the first PSC IP
Next I set a static entry in /etc/hosts on each of my PSCs, and vCenters to do the same as i’ve seen vCenter especially cache DNS entries in it’s local dnsmasq.
Next step was to stop & start all services on each PSC
service-control –stop –all
service-control –start –all
And hey presto the services started! Ran the same on vCenter and the services also started. This allowed me to go in and modify the load balancer pools to set the members to enabled.
Once the load balancer was back as it should be it was just a case of removing the /etc/hosts entries on each VM and reverting the DNS server change to point the load balancer FQDN back to its correct IP address.
For completeness I restarted all the services on each appliances in the above mentioned order
Moral of the story? Dont disable both nodes in a load balancer pool!
Now onwards with the original testing i needed to do!
LifeOfBrianOC 