VSAN-9 Witness Appliance Not Deploying Properly

[StephenMoll]

I am trying to work out how to script the deploying of a VSAN-9 stretched cluster, so obviously will need the witness appliance.

The scripts have worked fine with vSphere-7 and vSphere-8, needing just a few tweaks to get it working with 9, up to the point of deploying the vSAN Witness.

With 9 it has not worked. An appliance is deployed, but when it boots up, it appears with an IP address of "0.0.0.0 (DHCP)", where the OVF deployment has a fixed IP supplied. The correct IP address is applied manually, using the correct credentials, which shows that the OVF parameters are being read in, because the password is in there as well. Once set, logging into the Web Client, there is a warning that the license has expired, but probably explains why no settings stuck.

We found the article below and followed that, which produced the same result:

Witness hosts in 9.0 require to be manually tagged as a witness host for the witness license to be applied

Double checking both the physical host and the witness itself after deployment shows that both have "Witness License Enabled = TRUE".

Anyone have any ideas as to what is going wrong here?

[TheBobkin]

@StephenMoll, from what you described, the indication is that you are hitting a known issue which is fixed in VCF 9.0.1 which is scheduled to be released soon.

There is an in-place workaround for this issue but engineering did not confirm with GS whether making that information publicly available will be permissible (will follow-up with colleague that engaged with them for possible further clarification on that aspect).

This issue only impacts Witnesses deployed on version 9.0.0 so another feasible workaround is to deploy one using a previous version then update it.

[StephenMoll]

@TheBobkin, Thank you for your response. I have raised the issue with our TAM, so hopefully he will come back with that information. Good to know this has been fixed.