vRA 7.0.1: vco service - Exeception during remote status retrieval for url

• Craig

While working in a vRA 7.0.1 environment recently I came across an interesting issue where some core services were not behaving the way they should. The vco service seemed to be unregistered and shell-ui-app along with advanced-designer-service were showing as UNAVAILABLE.

Service-List

Taking a closer look at the vco service revealed the following error:

Exeception during remote status retrieval for url: https://vra.company.local:8281/vco/api/status. Error Message I/O error on GET request for "https://vra.company.local:8281 [vra.company.com/127.0.0.1] failed: Connection refused: nested exception is org.apache.http.conn.HttpHostConnectException: Connect to vra.company.local:8281 [vra.company.com/127.0.0.1] failed: Connection refused.

The first thing that caught my eye was that requests were being made on port 8281. This shouldn’t be the case as the embedded vRO instance is exposed on port 443. A quick curl to the endpoint url confirmed that this was the case.

curl https://vra.company.local:8281/vco/api/status - Did not work

curl https://vra.company.local:443/vco/api/status - Worked as expected

After a bit of google-fu I came across a KB2112679 which suggests using vcac-vami vco-service-reconfigure to resolve issues with embedded vRO connectivity issues.

Running the command and waiting for a few minutes seemed to re-register the service. However the shell-ui-app and advanced-designer-service were still UNAVAILABLE.

vcoservice1

Giving the appliance a reboot seemed to allow the services to start in order and satisfy any dependencies that they had on the vco service. After a few minutes all services were showing as REGISTERED.

all-registered

Happy days :-)

UPDATE: It also looks like Xtravirt colleague Giuliano Bertello had some success with vcac-vami. You can find his article here.

More information on troubleshooting vRA services with PowervRA can be found in this article: https://www.helloitscraig.co.uk/2016/03/introducing-powervra.html