Funny thing though is that this particular vCenter Appliance should’nt even be working anymore because once the certificate is expired, most of the time it won’t even start all of the vCenter services once you reboot it. Below you can find some snippets of logs which might be interesting for you to match your problem to the one I was having:Īll certificates checked out but guess what, the “MACHINE_SSL_CERT” didn’t. Which got me thinking and looking at the certificates for this vCenter Server Appliance.
Once we dove into the log files from the license service in “/var/log/vmware/cis-license/license.log” we noticed some Security Token Service STS service, SSO service and web-client service issues in regards to certificates. We also noticed that the License module in the vSphere client was also providing us with a timeout.
Going to the ESXi host directly you could however see that the license was present and activated. Going to the “Licensed Features” tab in the vSphere Client (VCSA version 6.0 GA) usually gives you a nice overview of what vSphere license is installed, but this time it was just empty. So we started troubleshooting the VCSA server and noticed that it couldn’t retrieve the installed licenses (VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus) from the production ESXi hosts anymore. Which is weird and something I’ve never seen before.
For starters the vMotion and Storage vMotion features weren’t working anymore because of time-outs. Recently we’ve had some weird issues on one of our customers vCenter Servers.