OpsManager VM not assigned an IP address on creation

Products

• Operations Manager

Issue/Introduction

Using a pipeline job that creates jump-servers by importing the opsman ova into VSphere and using it to create and start a VM. 

Latest run of  the pipeline with ops-manager-vsphere-3.0.40.ova. The job failed in one occasion but succeeded in the other regions. 

Each time the job fails, the VM has been created and started up but does not get assigned an IP address; the automation fails at this point as the VM is uncontactable. 

Been unable to reproduce this problem in a lab environment after running the pipeline few times times. 

Can you tell us what might cause a VM to start and not be assigned an IP address? What information should we collect if we  experience this problem again?

Environment

Concourse

Opsman 3.0.40 

vSphere datacenter

Cause

Running a test with opsman 3.0.40 deployment the problem can be occasionally reproduced. Where the deployed VM does not have IP address assigned

Here are several elements that can be used to verify the  status of VM in case this issue happens again.

1. From vCenter verify the status of the deployed VM --> Configure --> vApp Options In this section you should be able to see the IP, mask, gateway etc defined for this VM

2. Verify if VM is powered on and running 

3. Verify if the VMware tools are running on the VM - you can find out from the summary of the VM --> VMware Tools  -  "Running, version:12389 (Guest Managed)"

4. Verify for any messages or alerts on the VM - Monitor - Tasks/Events tabs one possible output (note this could be a configuration on vCenter to restart VMs in case of vMware tools heartbeat failure):

"This virtual machine reset by vSphere HA. Reason: VMware Tools heartbeat failure. A screenshot is saved at [vsanDatastore] <ID>/Ops_Manager8-1.png"

5. Try and manually restart the VM and verify if the VM will start vMware tools and eventually will pick the assigned IPs

 

Usual tool for VM deployment using concourse pipeline is using govc for upload and execution of the VMs

Executing: "govc import.ova -options=/tmp/options.json<ID> image/ops-manager-vsphere-3.0.40+LTS-T.ova"

Such problem "occasionally VM not picking IP address defined in vAPP Options" is mainly due to VMware tools are not started. There should be a short restart after VMware tools finds out the settings so network changes are applied. Simialr steps are reflected in KB 396866

 

Resolution

In case this issue still persists vCenter logs and VMs logs will be helpful to further investigate this issue and narrow down the reason for the missing IP settings