VCAP-CMA Deploy – Objective 4.1

Disclaimer: These are my notes from studying for the 3V0-31.18 exam. If something doesn’t make sense, please feel free to reach out.

The main goal for the whole of section 4 is to know where to start with troubleshooting various aspects of vRealize Automation.

Objective 4.1 – Troubleshoot Infrastructure Issues

References

I’m going to break this down into user troubleshooting (think permissions, blueprints, business group etc.) & compute troubleshooting (Endpoints, SQL, IaaS etc.). For both of these sections you’ll need to know where to find what the issue is and how to interpret that information. I suspect this will be fixing stuff that was working and now isn’t, rather than a failed deployment. Although it could be either.

Infrastructure – Compute

For infrastructure issues think along these lines:

When checking for issues, the first place I go to is the Log within the vRA console – Infrastructure, Monitoring, Log. This is the place where you would see if vRA can’t connect to the endpoint, and likely why. The error below is because the vCenter endpoint was offline.

While you’re in the monitoring section, the other useful tab is DEM Status. The error below shows that I’ve stopped the DEM service on the IaaS server.

This can be verified from the vRA appliance VAMI on the Services tab. This is a good place to check for any services that aren’t responding.

While we’re in this console, it’s worth having a look on the Cluster tab. This will show you if any servers in the vRA installation haven’t contacted vRA in a while. Also on the cluster tab you can generate & download the support bundle.

Once these have all been checked, the remaining place is the IaaS node. Login and check the Windows services & IIS AppPools have started. If everything is running, check Event Viewer, this tends to be where I find if the SQL database is available or not. Or if there is generally anything wrong with the Windows box. It’s also worth running through the list of pre-requisites (the automated check when installing). These could have changed through the application of a GPO or even manually.

Users

For user type issues think along these lines:

If the user needs to perform either an administrative function or a design function but isn’t able to, this is often down to the role of the user. Do they have the relevant tab available? The tabs each role should have available is detailed on my blog post from the VCP7-CMA, linked at the top.

If the user is attempting to provision an item but it isn’t available in the catalogue you might want to think of these:

If a user is a member of multiple business groups, the business group the catalogue item is assigned from is shown in the catalogue.

If provisioning is failing, the request will usually give you a reason why. This can quite often be something to do with the reservation. Such as:

 

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