vRealize Automation 7.6 Health Broker service does not start

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• vRealize Health Broker (vrhb) service does not start
• This prevents any Cumulative Patch installs during pre-check failures when querying the service

Environment

VMware vRealize Automation 7.x

Cause

The following properties and values are missing within the /etc/vcac/security.properties file:

healthbroker.db.user
healthbroker.db.name
healthbroker.db.password

Resolution

See the workaround below for further details. 

Workaround:
Ensure a valid backup or snapshot is available before moving forward.

1. On each vRealize Automation 7.x appliance within the cluster, delete the contents of the folder:  

/var/lib/vrhb/service-host/sandbox

2. On the Primary vRealize Automation 7.x appliance, backup /usr/lib/vrhb/service-host/local-users.json and /usr/lib/vrhb/service-host/vrhb-init.sh
3. Comment out line #141 within /usr/lib/vrhb/service-host/vrhb-init.sh:

Example: #config_ssl

4. Drop the vrhb database and vrhb user with the following commands:

psql -U postgres
drop database vrhb;
drop user vrhb;

5. Recreate the database by running the following command:

/usr/lib/vrhb/service-host/vrhb-init.sh

6. If in a multi-node configuration, sync the new user to each vPostgres replica instance by running the following commands:

/usr/lib/vrhb/service-host/local-users.json

7. Update each replica nodes /etc/vcac/security.properties file with the values of the three properties copied from the primary:

Example:
healthbroker.db.user=vrhb
healthbroker.db.name=vrhb
healthbroker.db.password=s2enc~t1NBj9Y6x9Qt6/hGM8vKKNggUh3BpfmfZcp1Nnr5oqA=

8. Start the vrhb service on each cluster node by running the following command:

service vrhb-service start

9. Uncomment line #141 within /usr/lib/vrhb/service-host/vrhb-init.sh.

Additional Information

Alerts through vRealize Automation Health Broker API
Cumulative Update for vRealize Automation 7.6