Issue:

During a new install of vCloud Director 8.20 on Centos 6.9 the service failed to start properly for the first time. 

 

 

Troubleshooting:

I investigated log files

# tail -f /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/cell.log

Output:

Application Initialization: 'com.vmware.vcloud.common.core' 100% complete. Subsystem 'com.vmware.vcloud.ui-vcloud-webapp' started
Application Initialization: 'com.vmware.vcloud.common.core' complete. Server is ready in 1:05 (minutes:seconds)
Successfully handled all queued events.
Error starting application: Transfer spooling area is not writable: /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer

I had created an NFS share on another file server before installation so I investigated the properties of the transfer directory

# cd /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/
# ls -l

Output:

total 12
drwx——. 3 vcloud vcloud 4096 Nov 16 12:53 activemq
drwxr-x—. 2 vcloud vcloud 4096 Oct 12 09:01 generated-bundles
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root   root   4096 Nov 16 11:23 transfer

the vcloud user and group need permissions on this directory

I tried 

# chown vcloud:vcloud transfer/

but this only changed the permissions to nobody:nobody

 

 

Resolution:

You will need to change the domain at both NFS server and NFS client side

On NFS client machine

# vi /etc/idmapd.conf 

Change Domain to your desired domain (eg jordansphere.co.uk)

[General]
#Verbosity = 0
# The following should be set to the local NFSv4 domain name
# The default is the host's DNS domain name.
Domain = jordansphere.co.uk

Restart the NFS Service

# service nfs restart

Repeat this on the NFS Server