VCF installer fails to deploy the VCF operations appliance "Failed to extract deployment details from vCenter VM with address"

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager

Issue/Introduction

• In vSphere 9, we've introduced the VCF Operations appliance as a SPOC for management, certificates, licensing, day to day operations etc.
• The appliance is needed in both VVF and VCF deployments and should be deployed via the VCF Installer.
• In some scenarios the deployment of VCF Operations fails with the following error 
  
"Failed to extract deployment details from vCenter VM with address"

Logs from the VCSA installer

# less -i /var/log/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/domainmanager.log

yyyy-mm-dd DEBUG [vcf_dm,689c70cffe4ece309ca491e35a20df3b,885c] [c.v.e.s.c.c.v.vsphere.VcManagerBase,dm-exec-21]  VM with address <vcenter.domain.tbd>
[...]
yyyy-mm-dd DEBUG [vcf_dm,689c70dfc141396a5c10d327f01571bb,0e99] [c.v.e.s.c.c.v.vsphere.VsphereClient,dm-exec-22]  Destroying 1 open views
yyyy-mm-dd ERROR [vcf_dm,689c70dfc141396a5c10d327f01571bb,0e99] [c.v.e.s.o.model.error.ErrorFactory,dm-exec-22] FAILED_TO_EXTRACT_DEPLOYMENT_DATA_FROM_VCENTER_VM Failed to extract deployment details from vCenter VM with address <vcenter.domain.tbd>
com.vmware.evo.sddc.orchestrator.exceptions.OrchTaskException: Failed to extract deployment details from vCenter VM with address <vcenter.domain.tbd>
        at com.vmware.evo.sddc.sddcmanager.helper.ColocatedVcVmDeploymentDataUtil.getVmDeploymentDataFromColocatedVc(ColocatedVcVmDeploymentDataUtil.java:145)
        at com.vmware.evo.sddc.vrealize.services.util.VcfMgmtComponentsDataPrepUtil.getDeploymentNetwork(VcfMgmtComponentsDataPrepUtil.java:82) 
[...]
Caused by: com.vmware.evo.sddc.common.client.vmware.vsphere.VsphereOperationException: Cannot find VC VM reference
        at com.vmware.evo.sddc.common.client.vmware.vsphere.VcManagerBase.lambda$getClusterNameOfTheMgmtVc$48(VcManagerBase.java:7026)
        at java.base/java.util.Optional.orElseThrow(Optional.java:403)

Environment

vSphere 9 

Cause

Checking Hostname/ PNID on vCenter, vs the DNS reply, we get the following answers

# /usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli get-pnid --server-name localhost 
VCENTER.domain.tbd

# hostname -f
VCENTER.domain.tbd

# nslookup VC_IP
vcenter.domain.tbd  

The issue is similar to KB vCenter 7.x Upgrade Failure: ‘Failed to Set Hostname’ Error, in the sense that the root cause, and that is a UPPER/ lower case mismatch.

Resolution

Use the PNID/ Hostname answer when deploying the VCF operations appliance 
<VCENTER>.domain.tbd