Unable to view maps in home and physical data center in VCF Operations

Products

• VCF Operations

Issue/Introduction

When navigating to the Home or Physical Data Center views in VCF Operations, the map fails to render. You may observe the following symptoms:

• The Map view remains blank or displays a connection error.
• The error message "The map requires an active internet connection to be viewed" appears in the UI.
• Manual connectivity tests (e.g., using curl) to tile.openstreetmap.org or tile.jawg.io via a proxy appear successful (HTTP 200), but the map still does not load in the browser.

Environment

VCF Operations 9.x

Cause

The map functionality in VCF Operations relies on several specific subdomains to retrieve map tiles. Even if primary domains are whitelisted, the map will fail to render if the browser cannot reach individual tile servers (subdomains a, b, c, or d) through the network proxy or firewall.

Additionally, because the map is rendered by the browser, the machine or jump server used to access the VCF Operations UI must have direct or proxy-based access to these subdomains.

Resolution

Ensure that the machine or jump server used to browse the VCF Operations UI has access to all required map tile endpoints on port 443.

1. Whitelist Required FQDNs

Ensure the following Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) are whitelisted in your firewall or proxy:

• a.tile.jawg.io
• b.tile.jawg.io
• c.tile.jawg.io
• d.tile.jawg.io
• tile.openstreetmap.org

2. Verify Connectivity

To confirm the subdomains are accessible from your browsing machine:

1. Browser Test: Attempt to open one of the tile URLs directly in a new browser tab (e.g., https://a.tile.jawg.io). If successful, you should see a map tile image or a service response rather than a connection error.
2. Command Line Test: Use curl to test connectivity to specific subdomains via your proxy:
   curl -v -x http://[PROXY_IP]:[PORT] https://a.tile.jawg.io
3. Developer Tools:
   • Open Browser Developer Tools (F12) and go to the Network tab.
   • Filter for "jawg" or "tile".
   • Reload the VCF Operations page and check if any requests to these subdomains are being blocked (Status 403 or Connection Refused).