Friday, 22 July 2016

Creating A Local User And Granting Shell Access In ESXi 6.0

So, in ESXi 6.0 onward, if you login to ESXi directly from vSphere client you do not have the option to specify Shell Access when you are creating a local user. The screen that you will see when creating a new user here is:


If you create this user and login to the Putty, you get the message saying Access denied. 
The access.conf file should be updated automatically once the users are created and since it does not, perhaps due to security enhancements, there is a need of little tweaking that needs to be done.

Note: Please test this in your lab before you implement this in production. All the steps were implemented in a non production environment.

What you need to do is:

1. Create the user locally from the above wizard
2. Login to SSH for that ESXi host
3. Change the directory to:
# cd /etc/security
4. You will have a file called access.conf file. (Backup the file before editing) Open this file with a vi editor.
# vi access.conf

The contents look like below:


5. You need to add your user here in the format
+:<username>:ALL
6. Save the file
7. Restart the SSH session.
8. Now you can login to your ESXi host with the local user.

This user has shell access but not the root access. If I run any command to list the details of the devices connected to this host it displays the following:


Well that's pretty much it.

Friday, 15 July 2016

Web Client Login Page Displays vRA or vCAC As The Banner Name

So in 6.0, you should have VMware vCenter Single Sign On as the Web Client banner page login name. However, if you apply the Branding Name for the vRA appliance the web client banner display gets renamed. In some cases, the change occurs even when the branding is not selected. This is a bug in vRA and is discussed in this link here.

Now I am not a vRA guy and that is left to the handful in my organization. However, the case where I worked on was something similar:

Customer had 5.5 vCenter with vCAC installed. The vCAC was discarded and the vCenter was upgraded to 6.0. When he logged in to web client, instead of the Single Sign On banner it displayed vCloud Automation Center. This was indeed confusing and needed a fix.

Upon installation of vRA/vCAC the parameter vmwSTSBrandName gets populated with the banner image information for the vRA. Upon removal of this product this parameter is not cleared leading to the issue. This had to be removed from the vmdir for all the tenants present under the Identity Manager.

Before you perform the workaround, please have a snapshot and/or a backup of the vCenter machine.

1. Download Jxplorer by clicking this link here
2. Login to the PSC machine from Jxplorer using this link here
3. Expand Services > Identity Manager > Tenants
4. Click the tenant and switch to Table Editor View
5. In the table editor view, locate the filed called vmwSTSBrandName. This will be populated with a value as displayed in the below screenshot


4. Right click this attribute and select Delete.
5. Click Submit
6. If this is a Windows Server go to services.msc and restart the VMware STS Service. If it requests to restart the dependent services, click Ok.
7. If it is an appliance restart the STS identity manager service using the below commad:
# service vmware-sts-idmd restart
8. Reload the web client page. Once the vmwSTSBrandName attribute is empty it will display VMware vCenter Single Sign On by default.

Friday, 8 July 2016

Automatic/Manual Backup Verification Fails In VDP

To check the consistency of the restore points you have backup verification jobs. These verification jobs can be either Automatic (ABV) or Manual backup verification. The backup verification flow on a high level basis goes as:

>> Restore: Restores the restore point as a temporary VM on the ESXi host and datastore which is defined on the backup verification job
>> Power On: Powers On the VM.
>> Heartbeat Verification: Verifies the heartbeat for the restored virtual machine
>> Power Off: Powers Off the VM once the verification is done
>> Delete VM: Remove the temporary restored VM from the inventory and delete from disk.

The issue I am going to be discussing here is not a general issue, and this caused due to a very specific cause. However, the troubleshooting steps can be used and you might have similar causes due to which you will run into verification jobs to fail.

All the verification job logs are present under the following directory:
/usr/local/avamarclient/var/

The verification job that I had was something as:
xyz-backup-verify-1467724890971-c2857d179f4b9e67465bf496709d8bc1f43149ef-1016-vmimagel.log

I created it as xyz because I have a VM named xyz, hence the temporary restored VM would have a name similar VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz

So in the verification job the initial logging refers to the following:

>> Which vCenter this VM is going to be restored for verification
>> The ESXi host
>> The VMFS/NFS datastore

Their logging would be in the start of the verification log and would look something as:

2016-07-05T09:21:32.956+04:00 avvcbimage Info <16010>: vCenter 'ABC.vcloud.local' is 192.168.1.1
2016-07-05T09:21:32.956+04:00 avvcbimage Info <11981>: VM's host is ESXi.vcloud.local
2016-07-05T09:21:32.956+04:00 avvcbimage Info <11982>: VM's primary storage location is [Local-DS-1] VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189/VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189.vmx
So, to the error. To the very end of the verification log is the final moments of the process in my case were the errors:
2016-07-05T09:35:00.128+04:00 avvcbimage Info <19670>: vmAction runRemote()

2016-07-05T09:35:00.177+04:00 avvcbimage Info <19672>: vmAction powerOnVM()

2016-07-05T09:35:00.187+04:00 avvcbimage Info <17789>: Modifying VmxNet3 adapter: Network adapter 1 to not Connect at Power On

2016-07-05T09:35:00.213+04:00 avvcbimage Info <0000>: VM '[Local-DS-1] VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189/VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189.vmx' setNics config at PowerOn task still in progress, sleep for 3 sec

2016-07-05T09:35:03.243+04:00 avvcbimage Info <14632>: VM '[Local-DS-1] VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189/VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189.vmx' setNics config at PowerOn task completed, moref=

2016-07-05T09:35:03.266+04:00 avvcbimage Info <14629>: VM '[Local-DS-1] VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189/VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189.vmx' Power On task queued, sleep for 1 sec

2016-07-05T09:35:04.287+04:00 avvcbimage Error <16006>: vSphere Task failed: 'The operation is not allowed in the current state.'.

2016-07-05T09:35:04.287+04:00 avvcbimage Error <14635>: VM '[Local-DS-1] VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189/VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189.vmx' Power On task creation encountered a problem

2016-07-05T09:35:04.287+04:00 avvcbimage Warning <19673>: PowerOnVM failed or cancelled

2016-07-05T09:35:04.287+04:00 avvcbimage Info <19684>: vmAction cleanupVM() DeletingVM=0

2016-07-05T09:35:04.287+04:00 avvcbimage Info <19685>: vmAction poweroffVM()

2016-07-05T09:35:04.311+04:00 avvcbimage Info <0000>: VM '[Local-DS-1] VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189/VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189.vmx' Power Off task still in progress, sleep for 3 sec

2016-07-05T09:35:07.345+04:00 avvcbimage Error <16006>: vSphere Task failed: 'The attempted operation cannot be performed in the current state (Powered off).'.

2016-07-05T09:35:07.345+04:00 avvcbimage Error <14635>: VM '[Local-DS-1] VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189/VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189.vmx' Power Off task creation encountered a problem

2016-07-05T09:35:07.345+04:00 avvcbimage Info <19686>: vmAction deleteVM()

2016-07-05T09:35:07.387+04:00 avvcbimage Info <0000>: VM '[Local-DS-1] VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189/VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189.vmx' deletion task still in progress, sleep for 3 sec

2016-07-05T09:35:10.416+04:00 avvcbimage Info <14632>: VM '[Local-DS-1] VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189/VDP_VERIFICATION_xyz_1467724891189.vmx' deletion task completed, moref=

2016-07-05T09:35:10.416+04:00 avvcbimage Info <9772>: Starting graceful (staged) termination, ABV failed (wrap-up stage)

2016-07-05T09:35:10.416+04:00 avvcbimage Error <19702>: ABV failed

2016-07-05T09:35:10.419+04:00 avvcbimage Info <16038>: Final summary, cancelled/aborted 0, snapview 0, exitcode 170: completed with errors, client log should be examined

So here, the restore was done successfully and the network adapter is always disconnected for the verification VM to avoid IP conflict.
Then there was several tries done to Power On the virtual machine and all of them failed. Since the Power On was not completed the Power off failed as well.
The step to verify the heartbeat is excluded since the virtual machine was not powered On which led to the final state, delete the VM which was completed successfully.

That's pretty much it in the verification logs. This was not sufficient to find a cause, which led me to implement the next couple of tests:

1. For this verification job, I changed the destination host and datastore. Basically, I am doing the restore on a different host and a different datastore and it went through successfully. So something was either wrong with the host or the datastore.

2. So I changed the datastore location to the old path and the host still on the new one. The verification job completed successfully again. And when edited the job back to the old host, it failed with the same error.

So something is going on with this host! So we need to troubleshoot on the host level.

From the vobd.log during this time, I saw the following:
2016-07-06T14:01:49.787Z: [UserWorldCorrelator] 3011315291947us: [vob.uw.core.dumped] /bin/hostd(2038251) /var/core/hostd-zdump.003

2016-07-06T14:04:26.406Z: [UserWorldCorrelator] 3011471909126us: [vob.uw.core.dumped] /bin/hostd(2043706) /var/core/hostd-zdump.000

2016-07-06T14:08:35.096Z: [UserWorldCorrelator] 3011720596785us: [vob.uw.core.dumped] /bin/hostd(2099166) /var/core/hostd-zdump.001

2016-07-06T14:11:12.313Z: [UserWorldCorrelator] 3011877811665us: [vob.uw.core.dumped] /bin/hostd(2849623) /var/core/hostd-zdump.002

2016-07-06T14:13:48.795Z: [UserWorldCorrelator] 3012034293301us: [vob.uw.core.dumped] /bin/hostd(2040079) /var/core/hostd-zdump.003
So here the hostd daemon on the host has crashed and a zdump is created. So the hostd and hostd-worker threads were in a crash state and hence I rebooted the host.

After a reboot the hostd and worker thread were not in an inconsistent state anymore allowing me to perform verification tasks without any issues on this host.

There can be multiple causes for backup verification failure. Well this is one of them!

Friday, 1 July 2016

Perform A VDP Backup When The Datastore For Client VM Is Running On Low Space

If you try to backup a virtual machine which is residing on a datastore running low on space, the backup fails. The VDP will try to issue a snapshot take call, however, the task is not initiated for either Create Snapshot or VDP: Backup. Instead you see the following in the reports tab. 

VDP: Failed to create snapshot

The backup job log located at /usr/local/avamarclient/var will have the following logging:

2016-06-30T09:59:11.371+07:00 avvcbimage Info <19704>: DataStore Storage Info:Local-esxi02 capacity=4831838208     free=138412032
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Info <19716>: DS Capacity=4831838208     FreeSpace=138412032      / HD committed=3951319082     unCommitted=1680           unShared=3758096384
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Info <19717>: DS(Local-esxi02) does not have enough free space (138412032     ) for disks used (197565952).
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Error <19661>: Datastore does not have enough free space for snapshot
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Info <9772>: Starting graceful (staged) termination, failed to create snapshot (wrap-up stage)
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Error <0000>: [IMG0009] createSnapshot: snapshot creation  or pre/post snapshot script failed
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Error <0000>: [IMG0009] createSnapshot: snapshot creation/pre-script/post-script failed
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Info <40654>: isExitOK()=202
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Info <40659>: snapshot created:false NOMC:false ChangeBlTrackingAvail:true UsingChBl:true, ExitOK:false, cancelled:false, fatal: true
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Info <40654>: isExitOK()=202
2016-06-30T09:59:11.372+07:00 avvcbimage Info <40660>: vcbimage_progress::terminate
2016-06-30T09:59:11.373+07:00 avvcbimage Info <16041>: VDDK:VixDiskLib: VixDiskLib_EndAccess: Disk access completed.

Now there is a parameter that can be added to avvcb daemon to ignore the free space on the datastore and still proceed with the backup operation. This workaround is tricky, why because let's consider the following situation:

You have a virtual machine of about 500 GB on a datastore of 550 GB. So the free space on the datastore is 50 GB. Let's say we added the parameter to ignore this and still take a backup, and the new data that has come into the VM has reached the 50 GB free space limit, then the VM will straight up stop to function because it has no space to get the new data. At this point of time, you will end up expanding the datastore so that the VM can be powered on. 

This is why, it is always recommended you expand the datastore then perform a backup. Now, there are certain cases where that 500 GB VM is a file server where no new data is coming in, In that case, we are good to add this parameter and run the backup. 

How do we do this?

1. SSH into your VDP appliance and change to the following directory:
# cd /usr/local/avamarclient/var
2. You will have a file called as avvcbimageAll.cmd
3. Open this file using a vi editor and edit the file to add the following parameter:
--snapshot_max_change_percent=0
4. Restart the avagent daemon using the below command
service avagent-vmware restart
5. Now you should be able to run the backup job even when your datastore is running low on space. 

Note:
If you are using internal proxy, then this step will be done on the VDP appliance itself as the avvcbimage lies on the appliance itself. If you are using external proxy, then you will have to edit the avvcbimageAll.cmd file on the proxy machine, as the proxy VM would be responsible for opening/closing VMDK as this machine runs the avvcb daemon. Also, if you have multiple proxy VMs, then add this parameter to all your external proxy machines and restart the avagent service on all of them. 

This is supported on 6.1 VDP as well. 

Wednesday, 29 June 2016

VDP Backup Fails: Error In Creating Quiesce Snapshot


So there are many causes of failure for unable to quiesce a VM while taking a snapshot and this is one of them I came across while working on an issue. 

A brief summary what was happening here:
There was a virtual machine which was being backed up by VDP and it used to fail when VDP was initiating a quiesce snapshot on it. 

The backup job logs were showing the below:

2016-06-10T14:00:47.451+04:00 avvcbimage Info <0000>: vm-2412
2016-06-10T14:00:47.469+04:00 avvcbimage Info <0000>: Snapshot 'VDP-1465581646a5cf9db1234fe3558e090fec0f29a7eaa4807b2e' creation for VM '[XYZ] abc/abc.vmx' task still in progress, sleep for 3 sec
2016-06-10T14:00:50.524+04:00 avvcbimage Info <0000>: Snapshot 'VDP-1465581646a5cf9db1234fe3558e090fec0f29a7eaa4807b2e' creation for VM '[XYZ] abc/abc.vmx' task still in progress, sleep for 3 sec
2016-06-10T14:00:53.576+04:00 avvcbimage Warning <19733>: vSphere Task failed (quiesce, snapshot error=45): 'An error occurred while saving the snapshot: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine.'.
2016-06-10T14:00:53.576+04:00 avvcbimage Error <17775>: Snapshot 'VDP-1465581646a5cf9db1234fe3558e090fec0f29a7eaa4807b2e' creation for VM '[XYZ] abc/abc.vmx' task creation encountered a quiesce problem
2016-06-10T14:00:53.576+04:00 avvcbimage Warning <0000>: The VM could not be quiesced prior to snapshot creation and this backup will not be used as a base for subsequent CBT backups if successful.

So we tried a couple of basic troubleshooting steps such as uninstalling VMware tools and reinstalling it, moving the virtual machine to a different ESXi host and a different datastore. Everything produced the same result, Failed to quiesce the virtual machine. So if I quiesce snapshot the virtual machine from vCenter, it completes successfully. Only quiesce from VDP failed. 

The next step was to check the vss writer status on the virtual machine. So from an elevated command prompt, I ran the below command
vssadmin list writers

All the VSS writers were in a healthy state without any error. Then, I proceeded to check the Event Logs for VSS issues, and there was none. 

Next, over to the vmware.log for this virtual machine, displayed the below logging:

2016-06-13T18:01:55.531Z| vmx| I120: SnapshotVMX_TakeSnapshot start: 'VDP-1465581646a5cf9db1234fe3558e090fec0f29a7eaa4807b2e', deviceState=0, lazy=0, logging
=0, quiesced=1, forceNative=0, tryNative=1, sibling=0 saveAllocMaps=0 cb=B986C80, cbData=323CE050
2016-06-13T18:01:55.739Z| vcpu-2| I120: ToolsBackup: changing quiesce state: IDLE -> STARTED
2016-06-13T18:01:57.770Z| vcpu-0| I120: Msg_Post: Warning
2016-06-13T18:01:57.770Z| vcpu-0| I120: [msg.snapshot.quiesce.vmerr] The guest OS has reported an error during quiescing.
2016-06-13T18:01:57.770Z| vcpu-0| I120+ The error code was: 5
2016-06-13T18:01:57.770Z| vcpu-0| I120+ The error message was: 'VssSyncStart' operation failed: IDispatch error #8451 (0x80042303)
2016-06-13T18:01:57.770Z| vcpu-0| I120: ----------------------------------------
2016-06-13T18:01:57.775Z| vcpu-0| I120: ToolsBackup: changing quiesce state: STARTED -> ERROR_WAIT
2016-06-13T18:01:59.797Z| vcpu-0| I120: ToolsBackup: changing quiesce state: ERROR_WAIT -> IDLE
2016-06-13T18:01:59.797Z| vcpu-0| I120: ToolsBackup: changing quiesce state: IDLE -> DONE
2016-06-13T18:01:59.797Z| vcpu-0| I120: SnapshotVMXTakeSnapshotComplete: Done with snapshot 'VDP-1465581646a5cf9db1234fe3558e090fec0f29a7eaa4807b2e': 0
2016-06-13T18:01:59.797Z| vcpu-0| I120: SnapshotVMXTakeSnapshotComplete: Snapshot 0 failed: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine (40).
2016-06-13T18:02:08.245Z| vmx| I120: SnapshotVMX_Consolidate: Starting
2016-06-13T18:02:08.245Z| vmx| I120: SnapshotVMXConsolidateOnlineCB: nextState = 0 uid 0


So from vmware.log I saw logging regarding guest was unable to quiesce the virtual machine and VSS sync driver failed to start which led to failure of snapshot creation. 

Something was going on the VSS end. The VSS writers were good, so I proceeded to check the VSS providers. 
vssadmin list providers

This listed two providers with their own UUID. However, in the registry, there were three UUID entries. See the below image:


If you see here, 7669 is not a provider UUID. So, I took a backup of registry, and deleted this entry from the registry post which quiesce snapshots were successful from VDP. 

Hope this helps to someone out there facing this issue. 

Friday, 24 June 2016

Configure Syslog For VDP Appliance

So you want to forward VDP logs to a syslog server? Okay. Is it supported officially? No, VDP does not support forwarding its logs to a different machine or a log solution. Is a workaround available? Yes.

The VDP appliance is based on a SUSE box and we have the syslog-ng file which can be used to configure remote syslog for this machine.

In my lab, I have a VDP 6.1.2 appliance which is configured to a 6.0 U2 vCenter Server. The syslog collector solution I have here is VMware vRealize Log Insight. 

So how do we achieve this?

1. So William Lam has written a script which can be used to configure syslog for various VMware products. We will be using that script to configure syslog for VDP Server. Download the script from this link here.

2. So once this shell script is downloaded, copy this file into your VDP appliance root directory or /tmp directory. I used WinSCP to move this file to the appliance. 

3. Run the script using the below format:
# ./configurevCloudSuiteSyslog.sh vdp <Remote-Syslog-IP>

4. Once this command is executed browse to the following directory to view the syslog-ng configuration file.
# cd /etc/syslog-ng
#less syslog-ng.config 

5. The end of the file will have these lines appended:

# Configured using vCloud Suite Syslog Configuration Script by William Lam
source vdp {
       file("/space/avamar/var/log/av_boot.rb.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/space/avamar/var/log/dpnctl.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/space/avamar/var/log/dpnnetutil-av_boot.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamar/var/log/dpnctl.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamar/var/log/av_boot.rb.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamar/var/log/av_boot.rb.err.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamar/var/log/dpnnetutil-av_boot.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamar/var/avi/server_log/flush.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamar/var/avi/server_log/avinstaller.log.0" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamar/var/vdr/server_logs/vdr-server.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamar/var/vdr/server_logs/vdr-configure.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamar/var/flr/server_logs/flr-server.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/data01/cur/err.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/VmMgr.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/MountMgr.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/VmwareFlrWs.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
       file("/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/VmwareFlr.log" log_prefix("vdp: ") follow_freq(1) flags(no-parse));
};

# Remote Syslog Host
destination remote_syslog {
      udp("192.168.10.6" port (514));

};

log {
        source(vdp);
        destination(remote_syslog);
};

The port used here is UDP and the IP 192.168.10.6 is my Log Insight server IP, this will of course vary for you. 

6. Over to the Log Insight, Under the Hosts section, you can see my VDP section added:


7. When I click vdpnew (Hostname of my VDP appliance), I see the logging being available:



Well, that's pretty much it. Just a workaround, not officially supported though. 

Monday, 6 June 2016

Unable To Connect VDP To Web Client: Failed To Validate vCenter certificate

So out of nowhere today, when I tried to connect the VDP appliance to web client, I got the following error message:

"Failed to validate the vCenter certificate. Either install or verify the certificate by using the vSphere Data configuration utility"

A screenshot of the message:


The vdr-configure logs displayed the following: 
Location: /usr/local/avamar/var/vdr/server_logs

2016-06-06 20:42:26,067 INFO  [http-nio-8543-exec-6]-rest.AuthenticationService: Vcentre Certificate validation had failed
2016-06-06 20:42:27,454 INFO  [Thread-15]-vi.ViJavaServiceInstanceProviderImpl: vcenter-ignore-cert ? true
2016-06-06 20:42:27,514 INFO  [Thread-15]-vi.ViJavaServiceInstanceProviderImpl: visdkUrl = https://192.168.1.1:443/sdk
2016-06-06 20:42:31,127 ERROR [Thread-15]-vi.ViJavaServiceInstanceProviderImpl: Failed To Create ViJava ServiceInstance owing to Remote VCenter connection error

So I was not using any custom certificate here. All default VMware certificate on my 5.5 vCenter. 

The resolution:

1. Restart all VDP services using the below command:

dpnctl stop all
dpnctl start all

2. When I logged into https://VDP-IP:8543/vdp-configure page I noticed the following:


I have an external proxy here, and it looked like the proxy VM was down. Restarted the proxy VM, yet the services and proxies status was not updated, which is when I proceeded to Step (3).

3. Re-register your VDP appliance to vCenter. You can follow this link here to get this task done.

Once the re-register (Same VDP user or a different user) was done (Without any changes to vCenter port or IP) the appliance was able to connect successfully to the web client.

Interesting enough, I was unable to find the cause of this, although I suspect that the connectivity between vCenter and VDP was broken. If there is something more detailed, do comment below. Always looking for VDP deep-dives.

That's pretty much it!