"OS Configuration Phase has failed." in deploying VMware Cloud Director with configurations of static routes

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• After deploying VMware Cloud DIrector appliance and access to https://VCD-ADDR:5480/, "OS Configuration Phase has failed." error dialog is shown.
• In vapp options, static routes are configured.
• This VM can reach DNS servers via only configured static routes but cannot reach DNS servers via the default route.
• In /opt/vmware/var/log/firstboot, you can see entries similar to:

2023-09-27 02:19:50 | System hostname is: photon-machine
2023-09-27 02:19:50 | [ERROR] Hostname was not updated via dns reverse-lookup. Failing OS configuration phase.
2023-09-27 02:19:50 | [ERROR] Fix and verify DNS server info and other related networking settings, and redeploy this appliance again.

Environment

VMware Cloud Director 10.x

Cause

This behavior is because hostname is set by reverse-lookup before the static route is set. As a result, the hostname of this VM is set to "photon-machine" and this name cannot be resolved.

Resolution

This is expected behavior during the installation of VMware Cloud Director appliances.

Please see the Host Name Resolution section in the Cloud Director documentation on Network Configuration Requirements for VMware Cloud Director for more details.

Workaround:

In the initialization steps, DNS server should be reached via the default route. After this, you can change DNS and route configurations of VMware Cloud Director appliances.

Additional Information

Network Configuration Requirements for VMware Cloud Director