In follow up to this when enabling verbose logs and tailing what it has written, there are no obvious error messages however the last command executed was:
vCSASCliInstallLogger - DEBUG - Run command: /home/vi-admin/vmware-vcsa/vcsa-cli-installer/lin64/jre/bin/java -jar /home/vi-admin/vmware-vcsa/vcsa-cli-installer/dbchecker/dbchecker.jar servername/VCDB vpxuser ******
Taking this into account:
- I changed my working directory to the dbchecker and ran the java -jar dbchecker.jar
- As expected it asked for parameters, so in theory as long as the parameters coming from my json file are fine then this "should" work
- After looking at my json file again, I noticed that my database type was set to external hence the error message; changing to embedded partially resolved the issue in that another error message was presented (below)
The SSO password meets the installation requirements.
Error: failed to read from file: vmware-vcsa
Completed with errors
Gathering VC support log bundle. This can take a few minutes.
Failed to gather VC support bundle. Details: Failed to find VM: ServerName
Checking my log file didn't reveal anything useful but searching for the above file which failed pointed me to what is/was the OVA specified in my json file, looks like I fat fingered the path hence the error message.
Re-running the command after making the relevant changes and off it went, ovftool kicked in and started to deploy; in theory I should have a deployed vCenter server soon :-)
Root Cause: human error