I was installing VMware vCloud Director 9.1 for Service Providers the other day and ran in to a problem that is “by design” if you will but if you are new to vCloud Director it still might be a show stopper for you.

In my case I was installing vCloud Director on a CentOS 7 VM.  The problem itself manifests itself when the installation is done and you try to access the webpage but all you get is an empty webpage like this:

First of all before installing vCloud Director make sure you have all the required linux packages installed on the VM:

alsa-lib    
bash
chkconfig
coreutils
findutils
glibc
grep
initscripts
krb5-libs
libgcc

libICE
libSM
libstdc++
libX11
libXau
libXdmcp
libXext
libXi
libXt
libXtst

module-init-tools
net-tools
pciutils
procps
redhat-lsb
sed
tar
wget
which

Since my environment is a demo/test environment I’m using self signed certificates but in a production environment you should use real signed certificates.

But going back to the problem, everything installed correctly during the install and I had no problem connecting to the database server (again since my environment is for demo, I’m using Microsoft SQL Server Express 2016 – not supported in a production environment).

I had no problem connecting to the vcd server (to both http and console interface) and database using either IP address or FQDN. But still a connection  problem to the webpage, smells a bit like a firewall issue?

First a look into the logs using the command

tail -f /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vmware-vcd-watchdog.log

A warning “Server status returned HTTP/1.1 503”. Verifying the active firewall rules using the command

sudo firewall-cmd –zone=public –list-services

Only the ssh and dhcpv6-client services are enabled. It seems we’re missing a few services so enabling them using:

sudo firewall-cmd –zone=public –add-service=http

sudo firewall-cmd –zone=public –add-service=https

And verifying the new firewall rules:

Looks like it just might work now, probably good thing to restart the services just to be safe:

service vmware-vcd stop

service vmware-vcd start

And after a successful restart, reopening the browser will get you the good old web page once again:

Now that looks promising, clicking “Continue to this website (not recommended) brings us to this screen below:

Now it’s time to continue configuring vCloud Director.