Hello,
I have deployed Cloud Director 10.3 OVA template, the template deployment itself went fine, after which I turned the Cloud Director VM on. Then, I went to VAMI interface (:5480) to continue with the setup, as per VMware documentation. At the first step "NFS mount for transfer file location", I enter our NFS mount target 10.0.0.10:/vcd_nfs, and the validation fails with the message "Backend validation of NFS mount failed with: /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/nfs-test/test-file is owned by an unknown user with UID 4294967294; expected root". At this point, if I ssh to VCD appliance and do the mount manually, I see:
root@vcd-1 [ ~ ]# mount 10.0.0.10:/vcd_nfs /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/
root@vcd-1 [ ~ ]# ls -al /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/
total 8
drwxr-x--- 2 4294967294 4294967294 4096 Oct 12 19:47 .
drwxrwx--- 4 vcloud vcloud 4096 Oct 12 19:47 ..
UID 4294967294 is in fact a representation of "nobody" account which appears when NFSv4 ID-name mapping service is not running. On VCD appliance, nfs-idmapd service cannot be started individually, it is dependent on nfs-server service, which is not running at this setup phase:
root@vcd-1 [ ~ ]# systemctl status nfs-idmapd
* nfs-idmapd.service - NFSv4 ID-name mapping service
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nfs-idmapd.service; static; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead)
root@vcd-1 [ ~ ]# systemctl status nfs-server
* nfs-server.service - NFS server and services
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nfs-server.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: inactive (dead)
If I start nfs-server service manually, nfs-idmapd service starts running, and if I mount manually again, I can now see root account properly owning NFS transfer dir:
root@vcd-1 [ ~ ]# systemctl start nfs-server
root@vcd-1 [ ~ ]# mount 10.0.0.10:/vcd_nfs /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/
root@vcd-1 [ ~ ]# ls -al /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/
total 8
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Oct 12 19:47 .
drwxrwx--- 4 vcloud vcloud 4096 Oct 12 19:47 ..
With nfs-server and nfs-idmapd services running, VAMI NFS mount target validation now passes OK, and I can continue with the setup. So this looks like a bug to me, because setup NFS mount routines use NFSv4, but since the nfs-idmapd service is not running, accounts are not mapped properly and validation fails.
Just as an additional info, our NFS mount target is a NetApp storage NFS export.
Now, I found the above mentioned workaround, to ssh to VCD appliance and start nfs-server service manually, which allows NFS mount target validation to pass, but I am not sure whether this is supported and whether I can safely continue with the setup in this way. Can someone more experienced, or someone from VMware, answer whether my workaround is safe, so I can continue with the setup?
Thanks
Stjepan
