Here I am, I mild mannered guy following a simple procedure documented by a massively successful online company on how to import a simple VMware Virtual machine into their expansive, global online computing resource. Two extraordinarily competent companies making billions of dollars with thousands of employees surely must have vetted out this simple task of importing a VM from my system to theirs. Surely!
Amazon computing services must really want folks to do this. It means millions and millions of dollars in revenue.So, it must just work, right? Ha! Wrong. Nothing is ever easy!
My saga started moments after downloading their appliance. Actually, deploying the OVF template was typical. I quickly figured out what I needed to do, not documentation needed. I simply opened a console to the running VM and it showed me the IP and password for the browser app. So far, so good.
Moments after logging in I see AWS connectivity failed. Check my firewall for port 443 access. Check that ec2.amazonaws.com can be resolved in DNS. Of course that all works. There is also a persistent, nagging message advising a newer version exists. I already have the latest (1.4.1) and it tells me to get 1.4.1. Dumbass!
After three hours I give up and go home. In the shower the next day I had a thought. Since everything connects and the logs show no anomalies, it must be something else. Some time ago I had a weird problem using certificate authentication when the date and time of the local machine was a few months off. Sure enough my ESXi host was whacked out. The Amazon VM was getting time from the host and not the DHCP time server (poor choice in my opinion). So, I manually set the time on the ESXi host and re-enabled NTP (it keeps stopping on ESXi for some reason).
I deregistered the AWS connectivity from VCenter and rebooted the AWS VM. SUCCESS! The web interface showed successful connectivity to AWS. I registered to VCenter again. Success!
So, make sure the time on the ESXi host is set correctly and make sure the Vm has the correct time too.
Unfortunately my saga continues. After selecting the VM to import to AWS and then the new Import to EC2 tab, the client is in a constant Authorization Failure loop.
To Be Continued...
Moments later, I closely scrutinized the connector VM frontend.log file and found an entry indicating Vmware 5.5 is not supported. Phooey!!
3 comments:
So, I installed a VMware 5.1 Vcenter appliance and added the host with the EC2 VM connector VM. I Deregistered from the old 5.5 vCenter and registered to the new vCenter.
Now when I select a VM and click a Vm and then the Import to EC2 tab, I get login credentials (Access keyID and Secret Key). This piece of crap software will not allow me to copy/pase the keys. They are like 16 character and 48 characters with the most complex being the secrey key which is masked out. After several attempts, I am still unable to enter these correctly and can't see the key so I have no idea what is wrong. They guy who wrote this is a colossal asshole.
Thanks for writing this post,
I have been going nuts trying to make it work but I too have vcenter 5.5
I gave up. I might get back to it some day but like a lot of projects, when the wall becomes to high to climb I went on to a different task.
Post a Comment