Author: Adrian Page 3 of 12

If you have a production-ready VCD installation, you must create it with a database HA cluster that provides failover capabilities to the VCD database (deployments without database HA are not supported by VMware). The VMware Cloud Director appliance includes an embedded PostgreSQL database. The embedded PostgreSQL database includes the Replication Manager (repmgr) tool suite, which provides a high availability (HA) function to a cluster of PostgreSQL servers. To configure HA for the VCD database in a VCD server group, you configure a database HA cluster by deploying one primary and two standby instances of the VCD appliance.

If the primary database service fails, you can activate VCD to perform an automatic failover to a new primary. The automatic failover eliminates the need for an administrator to initiate the failover action if the primary database service fails to perform its functions for any reason. By default, the failover mode is set to manual.

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to configure VCD failover mode.

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Recently, I was troubleshooting a VCD 10.4 installation with three cells which experienced very slow response times during operations such as Power on/off a VM.

Looking throw the log files soon revealed messages such as:

ERROR | ActiveMQ BrokerService[] Task-15 | TransportConnector | Could not accept connection from tcp://:47990 : javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: Received fatal alert: certificate_unknown

To resolve this issue, we’ve checked if the certificate is expired by running the following command on one of the cells:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool jms-certificates --status

The following part of the command result shows, that all of the 3 cells didn’t had a valid certificate:

To generate new certificates, we’ve run the command:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool jms-certificates --certgen --force

Afterwards, we restarted all cells:

service vmware-vcd restart

This fixed the issue in this environment.