Steps to stop, start, or restart the VMware Cloud Director service before rebooting the nodes

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to stop, start, or restart VMware Cloud Director service.
This KB covers the below mentioned scenarios:

• VCD cell can't shutdown gracefully
• Executing the Cell Management Tool command:  "/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool cell -i $(service vmware-vcd pid cell) -s", it give the following warning "Cell busy, 1 task remain"
• No tasks are present in the Cloud Director UI
• Cloud Director database shows no tasks present in the task table

Environment

VMware Cloud Director 10.x

Resolution

This issue occurs due to a stale task in the VMware Cloud Director cell. To resolve it, a reboot of the cell is required.

 

For troubleshooting and maintenance purposes, it may be necessary to change the status of VMware Cloud Director service.

 

If you want to start the VMware Cloud Director service without rebooting the host, you can start them yourself any time after the configuration script has completed.

 

To manually start or restart the VMware Cloud Director service:

 

Note: This procedure stops all tasks in progress.
This procedure should only be used in an emergency situation. VMware recommends you to use the Cell Management tool first to perform this task.
For more information, see VCD Cell Management Tool.

1. Log in to the target Cell as root.
2. Open a console, shell, or terminal window and run the appropriate command.
   • To start the VMware Cloud Director service, run the command:

     [root@VCD-FQDN]# service vmware-vcd start
     Starting vmware-vcd-watchdog: [ OK ]
     Starting vmware-vcd-cell [ OK ]

      
   • To check the status of the VMware Cloud Director service, run the command:

     [root@VCD-FQDN]# service vmware-vcd status

      
   • To stop the VMware Cloud Director service, run the command:

     [root@VCD-FQDN]# service vmware-vcd stop

The systemctl variation of the above is also applicable:

systemctl <command> vmware-vcd

If the VMware Cloud Director service does not start:

1. Check the status of VMware Cloud Director.
    
   1. Change directory to the /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs and run the command:

      # grep -i "Application Initialization" cell.log

      
      You see the status of the VMware Cloud Director initializing as it loads the subsystems and a status of complete and the time taken to start.
      
      Note: You may have to run this command a couple of times.
       
   2. Watch the percentage numbers increase as the different subsystems load. When you see the line Application Initialization: Complete. Server is ready in X:XX (minutes:seconds), VMware Cloud Director has loaded successfully.
       
2. Check that the VMware Cloud Director processes are running by running the command:

   # ps -ef | grep vcloud

    
3. Check the runlevel information for VMware Cloud Director by running the command:

   # chkconfig --list | grep -i vmware-vcd
   vmware-vcd 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

    
4. Ensure that a vcloud user has been created in /etc/passwd , /etc/group , and /etc/shadow .

Additional Information

For related information, see the Cloud Director Documentation on to Generate and View the VMware Cloud Director logs.
and Perform an Orderly Shutdown and Startup of Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance Cluster.