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.
