Scheduled backups through vami fail

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Resolve scheduled backup not starting via vami.

Symptoms:
The customer is unable to schedule a backup through the vami, however, manual backup works. 

/var/log/vmware/applmgmt/backupscheduler.log

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS:MS [MainProcess:PID-64479] ERROR: Failed to issue the Schedules.run request. Exception: {data : None, messages : [LocalizableMessage(args=[], id='vapi.security.authentication.invalid', default_message='Unable to authenticate user')]}

Traceback (most recent call last):

 File "/usr/lib/applmgmt/backup_restore/py/vmware/appliance/backup_restore/Scheduler.py", line 131, in ExecScheduleRun

  status = svc_handle.run(scheduleId, comment='SCHEDULED')

 File "/usr/lib/applmgmt/pyclient/applmgmt_client-1.0-py2.7.egg/com/vmware/appliance/recovery/backup_client.py", line 1134, in run

  'comment': comment,

 File "/usr/lib/vmware-vapi/lib/python/vapi_runtime-2.100.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl/vmware/vapi/bindings/stub.py", line 317, in _invoke

  return self._api_interface.native_invoke(ctx, _method_name, kwargs)


You may also see errors like:

ERROR: Failed to issue the Schedules.run request. Exception: {LocalizableMessage (args=[], id='vapi.security.authentication.invaild', default_message='Unable to authenticate user')]}
 

 File "/usr/lib/vmware-vapi/lib/python/vapi_runtime-2.100.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl/vmware/vapi/bindings/stub.py", line 275, in native_invoke

  self._rest_converter_mode)

com.vmware.vapi.std.errors_client.Unauthenticated: {data : None, messages : [LocalizableMessage(args=[], id='vapi.security.authentication.invalid', default_message='Unable to authenticate user')]}

 

 

Environment

VMware vCenter Server and appliance 6.x
VMware vCenter Appliance 7.x
VMware vCenter Appliance 8.x

Cause

This issue occurs when there is a problem with the STS certificate. Running the checksts.py script will show STS certificates as valid.

Resolution

Run the fixsts script found in the article: "Signing certificate is not valid" error in vCenter Server Appliance

Note:  You may receive an error when you try to run the script:
bash:  ./recreate_machine.sh: /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
This error is caused by DOS carriage returns added to the script when copying from a Windows-based text editor.  To resolve this problem, run the following command and rerun the script:

sed -i -e 's/\r$//' fixsts.sh

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:
Services must be restarted on all vCenter servers configured in linked mode (ELM). 

Warning: This script will interact with VMDIR's database.
Take offline snapshots concurrently for all vCenter Servers and Platform Service Controllers in the SSO domain before running the script.
This script should only be run once per SSO domain.