I deployed a new vCSA in my environment (moving from Windows-based to the appliance) and needed to change the hostname post-migration. Changing the hostname required a reboot, but afterwards I couldn’t authenticate to the web GUI due to a certificate error. In the admin portal, I pressed the “Toggle Certificate Setting” button and rebooted the vCSA thinking that this would regenerate the self-signed certificate. However, the server did not reboot, it was hanging at:
Waiting for the embedded database to start up: .[OK]
This lead to a little Google research; below is the step by step process of getting the vCSA back up and running.
- Get console access through the vSphere client by connecting directly to the host the vCSA is installed on.
- Restart the appliance and at the GRUB boot loader screen press the down arrow
- Press “p” and enter the root password
- Using the arrow keys, highlight “VMWare vCenter Server Appliance” and press “e” to edit the boot options
- Highlight the “Kernel….” line, press “e” again to edit the boot string
- Append ” 1” (note the space) to the end of the line so that it appears “…showopts 1“. Remove quotes.
- Press enter and then press “b” to boot.
- The server should then boot
- Login as root
vcenter: ~# rm /etc/vmware-vpx/ssl/allow_regeneration
vcenter:~# reboot
And that’s it, the certificates regenerated and I was able to log back into vCSA. If this still doesn’t work, check this link for more information.