This morning I was deploying the new Protection and Recovery appliance for a customer. I decided to follow the vCenter deployment flow, filled in all the details in the ovf deployment wizard and waited for the deployment to complete. To my surprise, the appliance (in both datacenters) never came online with the details I had configured. They both came online with a link-local IPv6 address, no IPv4 address and no configured hostname or passwords that worked.

At first, I figured something went wrong with the download and I downloaded the ova again and redeployed the appliance. The same result…Finally I tried again with the ISO file but the result was the same.

Getting access and investigation

To get access to the appliance you can follow the well known photonOS root password reset procedure. Link to Broadcom KB if you don’t know how to do it. After the appliance restarted, I logged in and verified that the VM was actually getting the information I entered.

To verify this, I looked at the /opt/vmware/etc/vami/ovfEnv.xml file. Everything looked correct and as I expected. This tells me there’s something wrong with applying the configuration at first boot.

Network configuration

To avoid losing too much time, I figured I would manually apply the network configuration and see if the appliance would start working. Since PhotonOS 5 this can be done with either nmctl or systemd-networkd configuration files. I used the nmctl this time, setting all the network config can be done using the commands below:

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# Set static IP and CIDR prefix
nmctl add-addr dev eth0 a 192.168.2.50/24

# Add default gateway
nmctl add-default-gw dev eth0 gw 192.168.2.1 onlink yes

# Configure DNS server(s)
nmctl add-dns dev eth0 dns 192.168.2.80 192.168.2.81

# Set DNS search domain
nmctl set-dns-domains dev eth0 domains lab.brisk-it.net

# Set FQDN hostname
nmctl set-hostname vlr.lab.brisk-it.net

# (Optional) Set NTP server
nmctl set-ntp dev eth0 ntp 192.168.2.80

After you’ve done all this you can verify that the IP address has been set correctly using ip a show eth0 .

Restarting services

To make sure all these new settings stuck and are picked up by the services, we want to restart the services used by the appliance.

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systemctl restart va-configurator
systemctl restart dr-client
systemctl restart hms
systemctl restart srm-server

After this is done you can finish the configuration using the VAMI, which is reachable on port 5480 like usual.