PKS cluster creation fails with unquoted '\' must be followed in the kube-apiserver logs

Products

• VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• After pks create-cluster <cluster-name> has failed use pks cluster <cluster-name> to identify the bosh task.
• Bosh task fails with the error below

  3365  error       Tue Jun 19 17:40:14 UTC 2018  Tue Jun 19 17:48:43 UTC 2018  pivotal-container-service-1105d4b4ca6f4f2955bd  service-instance_b866a8ec-be25-48b8-8c45-53ef0218113f  create deployment 'master/9e47e96e-7e84-45cc-8db0-4e2830d054b2 (0)' is not running after update. Review logs for failed jobs: kube-apiserver

• bosh ssh in to the Kubernetes master vm and below error can be seen under /var/vcap/sys/log/kube-apiserver/kube-apiserver.stderr.log

  I0611 16:23:10.081483   15839 cloudprovider.go:59] --external-hostname was not specified. Trying to get it from the cloud provider.  error setting the external host value: "vsphere" cloud provider could not be initialized: could not init cloud provider "vsphere": 3:6: unquoted '\' must be followed by new line

Environment

Cause

PKS currently only supports User Principal Name (UPN) format. The above error occurs when username under bosh director and PKS tile are in the backslash format i.e domain\username. The username in backslash format passes the tile's validation but causes failure later during cluster creation.

Resolution

Change the username under bosh director tile and PKS tile to UPN format, <username>@<domain>. Example - [email protected].