Tag: Aria Automation

The vRealize Automation appliance is installed on Photon OS since verion 8.0. It includes native Kubernetes to host containerized services.The vRA services run as Docker containers in Kubernetes pods. Each Kubernetes pod hosts one or more containers. Examples of vRA containerized services are:

• RabbitMQ is the industry-standard message bus used in vRealize Automation.
• The vRA database is a PostgreSQL database which runs as a pod and uses a Persistent Volume (PV) to store data.
• The vRealize Orchestrator service runs as a pod hosting two key containers, the control center (manages operations of vRO and plugins) and the vco-server (the orchestration engine).

Another basic container concept is a Namespace. Namespaces are a way to divide Kubernetes cluster resources between multiple users.

As you can see, vRA has many components. Of course, they can fail and some knowledge is required to troubleshoot these scenarios.

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Recently, services didn’t come back up again on vRA 8.6 single node installation after a power loss in my homelab.

The connection to Kubernetes was refused and failed with the following error while executing kubectl get pods:

The connection to the server vra-k8s.local:6443 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?

I was finally able to fix it using the procedure described in VMware KB article 82378:

1. Take a snapshot of the vRA VM.
2. Locate an etcd backup at /data/etcd-backup/ and copy the selected backup to /root
3. Reset Kubernetes by running vracli cluster leave
4. Restore the etcd backup in /root by using the /opt/scripts/recover_etcd.sh command.
   Example: /opt/scripts/recover_etcd.sh --confirm /root/backup-123456789.db
5. Extract VA config from etcd with
   kubectl get vaconfig -o yaml > /root/vaconfig.yaml
6. Reset Kubernetes once again using
   vracli cluster leave
7. Run to Install the VA config
   kubectl apply -f /root/vaconfig.yaml --force
8. Run vracli license to confirm that VA config is installed properly.
9. Run
   /opt/scripts/deploy.sh