I was doing some tests in my lab and while deploying a new VCSA 6.0 I received an error that firstboot was unsuccessful. Not really a great error message if you ask me but okay. I had already validated DNS twice before I got started, but I checked it again just in case… DNS was all good, what else could it be? Figured NTP could be another problem and my friend William Lam confirmed that. I checked the host if NTP was configured and it was not for some reason. So I configured NTP on my ESXi hosts which was straight forward, but what about the VCSA I had deployed? Also not too complicated, I logged in via SSH and did the following:
- ntp.get
Will show “Status: Down” - ntp.server.add –servers 10.17.0.1
This configures VCSA to fetch the time from ntp server to 10.17.0.1 - timesync.set –mode NTP
Make sure that the time sync is set to ntp - ntp.get
Should show “Status: Up”
That should do it… By the way, you can simply check “resolv.conf” for DNS to see how it is configured today, also look at “hosts” for the host name etc.