This week I had a run in with the PSC and vCenter in vSphere 6.5 U1. I’m ashamed to admit it was really all my fault – being a bit fat-fingered and hasty in my inputting – I put a bump name in DNS, and then a bum name in the installer as well. That result in SSL certificate mismatches and errors…

So I seriously needed to clean out the guff I’d created and try again. There are couple of KB articles and blogpost that cover this scenario. I found I need to do four step. My life was made easier by enabling SSH on all the appliances along the way – and of course switching to the “Bash” prompt after logging.

I started the process by log in on to one of my functional PSC’s using SSH….

1.) Run cmsso-util command on a functioning PSC to clean out the bum PSC and vCenter references

cmsso-util unregister –node-pnid vcnj.corp.local –username administrator@vsphere.local –passwd VMware1!

cmsso-util unregister –node-pnid vcnj.corp.local –username administrator@vsphere.local –passwd VMware1!

2.) Shutdown the bum virtual appliances

3.) Run the vdcleavefed to really clean out the bum PSC and vCenter references. Despite running cmsso-util the ghostly remains of failed deployment haunted the web-client – indicating they were still there… vdcleavefed allowed me to remove the properly…

/usr/lib/vmware-vmdir/bin/vdcleavefed -h psnj.corp.local -u administrator -w VMware1!

/usr/lib/vmware-vmdir/bin/vdcleavefed -h vcnj.corp.local -u administrator -w VMware1!

4.) Delete the bum virtual appliances

Note: For future reference – it was these two KB articles stitched together that helped me resolve the issue.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2106736

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2114233