You deployed the VMware Cloud Director appliance successfully, but the VMware Cloud Director services might fail to start.

Problem

The vmware-vcd service is inactive after the appliance deployment.

Cause

If you deployed a primary cell, the VMware Cloud Director services might fail to start due to a pre-populated NFS shared transfer service storage. Before you deploy the primary appliance, the shared transfer service storage must not contain a responses.properties file or an appliance-nodes directory.

If you deployed a standby or vCD application cell, the VMware Cloud Director services might fail to start due to a missing responses.properties file in the NFS shared transfer storage. Before you deploy a standby or vCD application appliance, the shared transfer service storage must contain the responses.properties file.

Note: If your cluster is configured for automatic failover, after you deploy one or more additional cells, you must use the Appliance API to reset the cluster failover mode to Automatic. See the VMware Cloud Director Appliance API. The default failover mode for new cells is Manual. If the failover mode is inconsistent across the nodes of the cluster, the cluster failover mode is Indeterminate. The Indeterminate mode can lead to inconsistent cluster states between the nodes and nodes following an old primary cell. To view the cluster failover mode, see View Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance Cluster Health and Failover Mode.

Solution

  1. Log in directly or by using an SSH client to the VMware Cloud Director appliance console as root.
  2. Examine the /opt/vmware/var/log/vcd/setupvcd.log for error messages regarding the NFS storage.
  3. Prepare the NFS storage for the appliance type.
  4. Redeploy the cell .