I’ve recently been looking at VCO, our VMware vCenter Orchestrator product, more from a High Availability and Disaster Recovery point of view rather than a usability perspective. I admit I have little or no orchestration skills whatsoever, but there are plenty of other blogs and educational web sites out there to help you get started with VCO. Anyhow, whilst getting the product up and running, I hit a couple of snags that I thought would be interesting to share.
This issue was when I first attempted to log into the VCO server using the client. I fat fingered my fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of my VCO server, but rather than the client telling me “host not found” or something useful like that, I get this error message which tells me absolutely nothing. Once I added the correct FQDN, I was good to go.
Login error 2 – javax.jms.JMSException: Timed out waiting for …
This one was harder to figure out. Eventually the penny dropped. I was using an environment that previously configured with a VCO client. The version of the client was 5.5.0:
But my VCO server was version 5.5.1:
Could that be the issue? I decided to bring my client version up to match versions, and what do you know, it let me log in successfully. No more weird java ‘Timed out waiting’ messages. But why not simply tell me there is a version mismatch? Sigh.
I guess the one advantage is that I am in a position to feed this behaviour directly back into VMware. I’m going to try my best to have the VCO team improve the messages from both of these scenarios to make troubleshooting a lot easier.
