vROps Cluster without a Load Balancer (gotchas)

Product Version - vRealize Operations 7.5

While it is far from recomended to deploy a vROps Cluster without a loadbalancer there are circumstances where this is done.

Recently helping a customer deploy a couple of simple issues cropped up that were not immediately obvious as to why they were issues.

Unable to connect to Master Node when expanding the cluster

We hit this issue and initialy it was a question mark moment there were no firewalls in the way and network connectivity was good end to end.

I recently upgraded an instance of vRA from 7.2 to 7.5 and rather than do it the manual way I used VMware’s vRealize LifeCycle Manager (version 2.0 update 3).

Everything was going great and according to plan, the vRLCM pre-requisites checker made short work of all of the checks you need to do before you start an upgrade of vRA. You can see below vRLCM does a great job of keeping you informed of the current progress and in a really elegant way.

VMware KB2140539 where requesting an XaaS (vRealize Orchestrator) blueprint fails with:

Failed to retrieve form from provider

The KB describes it occuring when “more than one VMware vRealize Orchestrator instance is configured for different tenants”. The issue I faced is not the same - in my case, I had the system default tenant configured to use the embedded vRO, and the customer tenant configured to use the system default (which would be the embedded vRO!)

Having just completed a particularly problem-prone distributed IaaS install, this was almost the straw that broke the camel’s back. Logging into vRealize Automation for the first time as an Infrastructure Admin displayed the infrastructure tab and all menu labels as big ugly references, and no functionality:

{com.cmware.cap.component.iaas.proxy.provider@csp.places.iaas.label }

Rebooting the IaaS web servers restored the functionality of the IaaS layer but still did not fix the label issue, it took a further reboot of both vRealize Automation appliances, then the IaaS web servers to finally view the correct labels.

This was a fun little error, whilst installing the distributed IaaS roles I couldn’t seem to get the IaaS components to install – when I got the Website and Model Manager Data install it would fail with the following message:

I’ve pasted it in here because I couldn’t find anything through google that referred to my error messages – hopefully if you’re reading this you’ve found it because you’re looking for it!

Just a quick post regarding the vSphere Management Assistant 5 - when deploying the vMA with a static IP address, you might see the following error:

Power On virtual machine  Cannot initialize property ’ vami.DNS0.vSphere_Man- agement_Assistant_(vMA)’ , since network ‘’ has no associated IP pool configuration.

Edit the vMA virtual machine’s properties and go to Options, vApp Options and select disable. Acknowledge the warning and click OK to close the VM properties.