It’s been a good while since I’ve had a “tech tip” type of post, let alone one that is pretty short. I’ve gotten a good bit of hands on with VMC on AWS recently, with a whole lot more to come, so I’ll probably have a good chance to get more of these out in the near future.
While working on a POC engagement with a customer, I came across an interesting quirk trying to initially create the SDDC. After running the Cloud Formation template and connecting up to the customer’s AWS account, we attempted to select the VPC / subnet to connect to the AWS account and got this error message:
In this case, the VPC had been created in the Northern VA region, and sometimes it is the case that not all of the six availability zones in that region are available for the service. In this case, we went through the process of creating a temp subnet in every AZ so that it would at least find one available to populate the screen for us. After doing that and going back through the create SDDC process, we were presented with the same error.
Thanks to a tip from the VMware SE we were working with, we found an easy way to “refresh” that view by going back into the previous step of connecting to an AWS account. Clicking on the Choose an AWS Account drop down, selecting Connect to a new AWS Account option and re-entering the same account number that was previously used did the trick, and moving on to the next step finally displayed the VPC and available subnets.
At that point, we were able to go back into AWS and adjust the subnets by removing the temp ones and building the desired subnet in one of the AZs that appeared in the VMC console. Clicking on the refresh icon next to the subnets drop down refreshed that view, so we selected the desired subnet and were off to having a brand new cloud SDDC about 90 minutes later.
