vRealize Orchestrator – Resolving the ${message} blue screen issue

Here’s an issue that frustrated me for a while until I was able to finally resolve it. If you’re here reading this too, I feel your pain… Hopefully this helps you out as well!

I’m deploying vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) 7.3 in our lab for testing as I continue to build our cloud environment. To help detail the issue we have been having, I’ll provide a quick overview of our environment.

For our cloud, we have three separate environments:

• Core
  • Management nodes (NSX mgr, AD, DNS, SQL, PSCs for vCenter, and vCenter)
• Automation
  • vRealize suite (vRO, vRA, IaaS, SQL, PSC for Auto environment)
• Networking
  • NSX load balancer, ESGs, DLRs

During the initial vRO configuration, you configure it as standalone and then choose your authentication method. We are using vSphere authentication which will authenticate via the PSC (Platform Services Controller) in the Auto environment. We have a single SSO domain with relationships setup between the Core PSC and the Auto PSC.

Now that I’ve set the premise, let’s talk about the issue at hand. During the vRO standalone config, if you are using a load balancer you have to change the hostname to the your LB VIP for vRO. Then on the next screen you configure your authentication source. We’re using vSphere authentication and set it to our Automation PSC. Once complete, you’re taken right into control center using the root account. If you logout at any point, you may encounter the following issue when trying to browse back to control center (https://vro1.domain.local:8283/vco-controlcenter)

Here’s what I realized after seeing this issue and attempting various failed fixes… we had missed a step during our NSX load balancer configuration. Since the hostname was set to the vRO VIP and the authentication source now set to our PSC, SSO was looking to authenticate via our VIP rather than the local node. This lead us back to NSX where we had to configure another virtual server for port 8283 and a pool for our two vRO nodes as well.

Here’s what we ended up configuring on the NSX end:

NSX Virtual Server on the Load Balancer

NSX Pool on the Load Balancer

Once that was in place, I was able to get to the vRO control center using the VIP address. I also was able to join the second node to the cluster and verify all was good on that end after applying our needed SSL certificate!