SDDC precheck failing with the error: A problem has occurred on the server. Please retry or contact the service provider and provide the reference token.

Products

• VMware Cloud Foundation 5.x

Issue/Introduction

The SDDC manager precheck gets stuck at 46% for long or fails with the following error:

A problem has occurred on the server. Please retry or contact the service provider and provide the reference token.

Environment

• VMware Cloud Foundation 5.0.x
• VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.x

Cause

This issue that can occur when the vCenter session opened by SDDC manager expires before the discovery phase of the precheck workflow was able to complete.

Resolution

The issue is resolved in VCF 5.2.

As a workaround, follow the steps below:

Attention: Make sure to have a fresh working backup or snapshot of the vCenter Server Appliance. If the vCenter is part of an ELM replication setup, offline snapshots of all ELM replication partners are required. See VMware vCenter in Enhanced Linked Mode pre-changes snapshot (online or offline) best practice for more information.

1. Open an SSH session with the vCenter Server and login using the root account.
2. If necessary, switch into the BASH shell with:

   # shell

3. Edit the VAPI endpoint configuration file:

   # vi  /etc/vmware-vapi/endpoint.properties

4. Find the session.maxSessionIdleMilliseconds entry and increase its value.
   The default value is set to 1 hour, aka 3600000 milliseconds. Increase it to 2 hours, or rather 7200000 ms.
   If the line starts with a #, make sure to remove it to enable the setting.

   session.maxSessionIdleMilliseconds=7200000

5. Exit the VI editor with :wq! and restart the vapi-endpoint service:

   # service-control --stop vmware-vapi-endpoint && service-control --start vmware-vapi-endpoint

6. Confirm that the service was successfully started by opening the following URL in a web browser:

   https://<vc_hostname_or_IP>/vapiendpoint/health

Following these steps, run the precheck again and confirm that it succeeds.

Should the issue still occur, contact Broadcom Support.

Additional Information

Ensure there are no errors or warnings on the workload. Otherwise those need to be resolved before running the precheck. Validate the licenses are correctly assigned and that there is no alarm shown. For example, if the UI displays

License check: Failed to fetch assigned Licenses.

and/or

Retrieving configuration updates failed. Unable to compute applicability for drift RemoveNfsDatastoreConfigDrift. Because configuration realized check failed on resources [########-####-####-####-############]. Please check logs and fix the failures of drift configuration realized checks. Then restart the service to trigger the configuration realized checks again and re-try the API. If this does not resolve the issue, please contact GSS.

like in the image below, resolve those first: