VMware vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) is a very useful web console environment for VCSA management & maintenance operations, that has been existing on HTTPS://VCSA_URL:5480. One of these tools is Backup and with these tools, you can take a specified backup of vCenter data consists of Inventory & Configuration (Required) and Stats, Events & Tasks (Optional)
VMware published VCSA6.7 (version 6.7.0.14) with these protocols for Backup: FTPS, HTTPS, SCP, FTP, HTTP. But announced NFS & SMB will be supported after VCSA6.7U2 (version 6.7.0.3). We had two big problems with these useful tools, One of them is related to VSAN Health Service.
Whenever the Backup task has been started, it was stopped immediately and generated a warning about VSAN Health Service, because it seems to be crashed. (VCSA Management GUI exactly will tell us this happened.) Sadly if you try to start this service (even with --force option) it leads to another failed attempt and result is something like this:
So after many retrying for starting this service, I decided to check the files structure of this service in path of /etc/VMware-vsan-health and compare them with a fresh-installed vCenter Server.
Also, there are two files that could to be related to the cause of this issue: logger.conf file that has been absolutely empty in the troubled vCenter Server and VI result shows nothing, whereas in the healthy VCSA you can see something like below results:
When I checked the vsanhealth.properties, it shows communication of this service is worked with HTTPS, so its connections need to have an SSL structure. Then I found the second file: fwsecrets, it contains something like two hash streams. So I decided to risk and remove this file and the logger.conf file too (of course after getting its backup). At last, after some minutes the next try of service start was successful.
Remember that you need always to check DNS (FWD, RVS), NTP, Certificate and Firewall, Especially if you setup the vSphere environment with an External Platform Service Controller. I will explain the second problem in another post.
