Kristof's virtual life

This weekend I wanted to upgrade my vIDM. But as you know my luck by now, I got an error during the upgrade. It was giving me a “Failed” status during the pre-check.

Content blog article

1. First attempt
2. Second attempt
3. Conclusion

1.First attempt

There’s a KB article that describes the issue I’m having but it didn’t bring me the complete clarity that I needed => KB83587
So a good reason to create this blog article 😉

These settings can only be changed once the VM is powered off.
Once that’s done, we need to enable the vAPP options.
Go to your vIDM instance => configure => settings => vApp Options. Click on the “Edit” button.

Check the box “Enable vApp options” and go to the section “OVF Details”
Select “VMware Tools” and click on OK.

This is how it should look now. Now we need to add the properties to the VM. Click on “Add”

These are the keys that are mentioned in the KB but translated to my environment.

vami.DNS.IdentityManager=10.10.10.10 (your DNS server)
vami.domain.IdentityManager=vkasaert.local (your domain name)
vami.gateway.IdentityManager=10.10.30.1 (your gateway)
vami.hostname=vidm.vkasaert.local (your FQDN)
vami.ip0.IdentityManager=10.10.30.11 (IP of your vIDM)
vami.netmask0.IdentityManager=255.255.255.0 (netmask)
vm.vmname=VIDM (initially I thought this was the name of your vIDM in vCenter, but this should be IdentityManager)

Add these keys on your VM.
The category for all these keys are “Networking Properties” except for the last one (vm.vmname)
There you can leave the Category empty.

You will see that there are no categories in the dropdown list so you need to fill that in manually.

Give the correct value to the key

Once all the keys and values are set you need to power on the VM.
And I saw that I had network issues during my startup.

Because the network was,’t connected I had to logon through the console.

I executed these commands to check the ovfenv but unfortunately there are still some variables that are not set.

/opt/vmware/bin/ovfenv
/usr/local/horizon/scripts/networkwizard.hzn showovfenv

2. Second attempt

So what did I do next? I installed a new environment in my homelab and once it was installed I checked the vIDM properties… And here I saw the complete list.
The keys I missed were added to the VM and powered back on.

ceip.enabled=False
vami.DNS.IdentityManager=10.10.10.10
vami.domain.IdentityManager=vkasaert.local
fips.mode.enabled=False
vami.gateway.IdentityManager=10.10.30.1
vami.ip0.IdentityManager=10.10.30.11
vami.netmask0.IdentityManager=255.255.255.0
vami.searchpath.IdentityManager=vkasaert.local
vami.hostname=vidm.vkasaert.local
vamitimezone=Etc/UTC
vm.vmname=VIDM (this should be IdentityManager but I didn't knew that at the time)

I kind of hoped that with setting the correct keys my network issues would be solved but that wasn’t the case.

I logged back in on the console. The ovf commands still gave a few blanks so it was getting better.

/opt/vmware/bin/ovfenv
/usr/local/horizon/scripts/networkwizard.hzn showovfenv

But first I wanted my network back, so I executed /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net
This gave me the possibility to set the network back. I had to do it in this order to avoid errors => 6, 4, 3, 2
If I started with 2 I saw errors in the output.

Although I had network connectivity I wasn’t able to login to my vIDM through the webportal. So I restarted the services.

service horizon-workspace stop
service elasticsearch stop
service horizon-workspace start
service elasticsearch start

When I re-ran the precheck it was already better but still not there yet.

After some further digging I was thinking about the key vm.vmname
Initially I thought that this had to be the name of the appliance in your vCenter.
But I tried to set the key to “IdentityManager” and that solved all my issues.
You see that when I execute /usr/local/horizon/scripts/networkwizard.hzn showovfenv
There are no longer errors and all keys are returning values.

And indeed when I restart the pre-check all is good now 🙂

3. Conclusion

I probably could have minimized a lot of my issues if I knew from the start that “vm.vmname” is an important key in the process. “vm.vmname”should be the function of your appliance in this case “IdentityManager”

To be clear I’m adding the correct type of keys here

ceip.enabled=False
vami.DNS.IdentityManager=10.10.10.10
vami.domain.IdentityManager=vkasaert.local
fips.mode.enabled=False
vami.gateway.IdentityManager=10.10.30.1
vami.ip0.IdentityManager=10.10.30.11
vami.netmask0.IdentityManager=255.255.255.0
vami.searchpath.IdentityManager=vkasaert.local
vami.hostname=vidm.vkasaert.local
vamitimezone=Etc/UTC
vm.vmname=IdentityManager