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Saturday, February 23, 2013

Joining an existing vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) installation fails with the error message: “Error 29103. Cannot read file or directory.”

Problem

You have an existing vCenter deployed in your environment and you would like to deploy a second node in Linked Mode so you proceed with the install of SSO on the second node:

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Select Join an existing vCenter Single Sign-On installation:

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Select Multisite:

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… and proceed with filling in the fields to install but receive the following error:

Error 29103. Cannot read file or directory.

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Solution

The reason why I was receiving this error was because my colleague who deployed the first node used the Simple install option:

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… which does not support multisite as discussed in the following forum thread:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2154989

The solution?  Uninstall everything in reverse order for the first node and reinstall using the appropriate multisite settings:

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I went ahead and uninstalled and reinstalled the whole environment over the weekend to get Linked Mode up.  Situations like these is why I prefer to do everything myself.

6 comments:

Thomas Brown said...

Hey Terence, there actually is a VMware KB article regarding how to change the SSO instance that vCenter is using. In case someone does have a production vCenter that can't be uninstalled, that would probably be the best route going forward.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2033620

Terence Luk said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Terence Luk said...

Thanks Thomas. I suppose we can treat the SSO service collocated on the same vCenter service server as "corrupted" and proceed to uninstall, reinstall, then point the vCenter service to a newly installed one.

Thomas Brown said...

I havent tried uninstalling SSO while vCenter was pointed at it. I think I would probably install multisite SSO on another VM, point vCenter at that, then uninstall the old SSO instance. But your idea may work as well.

Terence Luk said...

That would work but we would ultimately have to perform another install on the original VM and point it back if we want to collocate the services together. I would probably prefer to just take the vCenter service down for a bit to just do it once.

Anonymous said...

Hi Terence,

My question is there an easy way of reconfiguring the second production vCenter 5.1 that was not joined the SSO in linked mode when it was first deployed as a simple install. I have an environment with dvswitch which can be a pain bringing all back to normal if i have to uninstall everything on the vCenter.