While performing a redesign of the vRanger infrastructure, I was deploying the virtual appliances throughout the multiple regions. All were successful except for one cluster, which would fail with “Error: The request was aborted: The request was canceled.”

Within vCenter, it also showed that the task was canceled.

This cluster and the others were rather homogenous, so it wasn’t clear what was causing this. To resolve, I was able to manually deploy the vRanger appliance via the vSphere Client as a regular OVF. The only caveats being that there are a few less-automated steps in this approach.

  1. Connect to vCenter and deploy the OVF that can be downloaded through the traditional approach.
  2. Connect to the VM Console and deploy VMware Tools in the same manner as other Linux systems (Default root password is ‘vzroot1′). The virtual appliance appears to be based on LFS (Linux From Scratch) instead of CentOS or Ubuntu like many other appliances.
  3. Open ‘Configuration Options’ window via Tools->Options within the vRanger Console, and navigate to the ‘Virtual Appliance’ section.
  4. Under ‘Configure Existing Virtual Appliances’ select ‘Add’ and navigate to the deployed VM.
  5. Enter the root password (Default: vzroot1). It should detect the IP Address automatically as long as VMware Tools are running properly. Select ‘Use as default virtual appliance for cluster’, if appropriate.

Once deployed, be sure to change the DRS Automation Level for the VM to ‘Disabled’ if using a version of vRanger that does not support vMotioning of the virtual appliances. The vRangerVA should now function as expected with all of the the joys that it brings: