The NSX Application Platform deployment failed while attempting to deploy the Helm cert-manager tool.

Problem

The system is unable to continue with the NSX Application Platform deployment due to an error encountered while deploying the cert-manager tool. The system displayed the error message Helm install chart operation failed.

Cause

A possible cause is the process that attempted to download the NSX Application Platform Helm charts and Docker images stalled, possibly due to slow network performance, and timed out.

Solution

  1. Determine if the deployment failure is due to the process timing out while attempting to download the NSX Application Platform Helm charts and Docker images from the public VMware-hosted registry.
    1. Log in to the NSX Manager as root.
    2. Perform the following debugging steps at the system prompt, where cert-manager-webhook-pod-ID is the value returned from the napp-k get jobs -n cert-manager command. 
      NSXManager-prompt% napp-k get ns 
NSXManager-prompt% napp-k get jobs -n cert-manager 
NSXManager-prompt% napp-k describe pod cert-manager-webhook-pod-ID -n cert-manager

    When the napp-k describe pod command returns the output Pulling image from ..., it indicates that the image download process is taking a longer time than normal. The system will retry the download.

    After waiting for several minutes and the napp-k describe pod returns the Running status, it indicates that the pod is up.

  2. After the pod is ready, retry deploying the NSX Application Platform again from the NSX Manager UI.