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Virtualization Vmware

vCenter 6.5 – Unable to Authenticate

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you all had a great weekend and Holiday. Guess what happened to me this morning? I came into the office (virtually of course) and discovered that our VDI vCenter environment was inaccessible. Now this is an older environment on its way out the door so I am not too concerned with it. However it would make our lives easier to have vCenter working for the decommissioning process.

When I tried to log into this VCSA Server I would receive the following message in a red banner across the top of the screen:

[400] An error occurred while processing the authentication response from the vCenter Single Sign-On server. Details: ‘Trusted root certificates’ value should not be empty.

When I said this environment is old, it was upgraded from 5.5 and is now comprised of a VCSA appliance and an external PSC. Although the database has been migrated to a vPostgress DB instead of the SQL database that is started on, we have still noticed issues as time has gone one.

We tried to log in both with AD credentials and the local administrator user and both failed. Which was very concerning as we did have an issue with a DNS a few months back which knocked out AD authentication and all of our hosts in a different environment. Resolving that issue required a ticket to be opened with VMware.

I logged into the VAMI on both the PSC and the vCenter server (AD Authentication on both) and I did not see any issues there. Everything looked health and good. Since this environment is going away we decided to see if a good old reboot would fix it since we could not remember when the last reboot on this system occurred.

After rebooting the VCSA appliance everything seemed okay. In fact the vCenter console logged me in automatically. We plan to look into this more, however with this environment being decommissioned in the next few days I don’t think we will find anything of value.

If I do find a root cause for this one I will make sure to post a update on this.