vCop’s appliance unable to connect to vCloud director

I ran into this one last week.  I was trying to tie my vCop’s instance into vCloud director with the vCloud adapter.   I tried using the hostname / ip without any success.  Some review of the logs for the adapter showed:

2013-08-08 14:57:50,272 ERROR [Collector worker thread 21] (171) com.integrien.adapter3.vcloud.VCloudAdapter.login - Exception occurred in login:
com.vmware.vcloud.sdk.VCloudRuntimeException: org.apache.http.NoHttpResponseException: The target server failed to respond

I just love java errors… I will spare you all the crap that came after.  The problem was simple but I had not expected it… DNS resolution was not working.  I did not believe it… why would I need DNS when I was using the ip address of my systems.   Well it’s a little complex by vcloud is three cells frontended by a F5 load balancer.   I was using the ip address of the load balancer but the public URL in VCD was set to a DNS name.  When you visit the ip address it redirects you and vcop’s to https://fqdn/vcloud  this redirection using DNS was causing the failure.   So we just have to get the linux appliances to see DNS.

1. Login as root on both the UI and analytics machine
2. Change the file /etc/sys/esxiconfig/network/configs
3. Add the following line
4. NETCONFIG_DNS_STATIC_SERVERS=”IP_ADDRESS_FOR_DNS_WITH_SPACES_FOR_MULTIPLES”
5. Run the following command to sync to /etc/resolv.conf
6. netconfig update -f

Then it should work.  Enjoy.