Kyle Gleed, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
I love the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and have been using it exclusively since early in the 5.0 beta. Unfortunately, I’ve been a bit negligent about upgrading the VCSA server in my lab (still running a very old pre-release build) so I recently bit the bullet and updated to the official 5.0 GA release. Everything went well with the exception of an error I ran into when trying to register the Auto Deploy plug-in. When I tried to register using the vSphere client I ran into a connection error:
I spent more time than I'd like to admit going over my setup and checking firewalls, routing, DNS and couldn’t come up with anything. So I eventually went as far as installing a second instance of the VCSA in a completely different environment and viola – same problem 🙁
Long story short, I finally tracked the error down to a service that wasn't running on the VCSA. When you first start the appliance it starts all the services except for the Auto Deploy service:
I suspect this may be intentional (and possibly even documented somewhere, although I didn't find it in any of my searches) as not everyone running the appliance will use Auto Deploy, but for me it definitely wasn't expected. What I learned is that this service needs to be running and listening on port 6502 in order to enable the Auto Deploy plug-in. The fix was a matter of simply clicking the “start ESXi Services” button and the Auto Deploy service started right up.
I then went back to the vSphere client and enable the plug-in without issue:
The good news to all of this, besides fixing my issue, is that during my troubleshooting efforts I came across this very handy KB article on how to troubleshoot Auto Deploy.
Renate
The documentation is actually fairly clear on this:
“If you want to use the Auto Deploy server on the vCenter Server appliance, you must start the service first.
You can start the service from the Services tab of the appliance.”
http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.install.doc_50/GUID-6BAEA093-E966-4BD8-9A09-EC41C4BE8737.html
Try the new searchable documentation center at http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp