The access to vCloud Director provider context (system administrator accounts) can be federated with vCenter Single Sign-On. This means that when vCloud system administrator wants to log into the vCloud Director (http://vCloud-FQDN/cloud) he is redirected to vSphere Web Client where he needs to authenticate and then redirected back to vCloud Director.
Here follows collection of topics that might be useful when dealing when troubleshooting the federation:
1. When the SSO federation is enabled the end-user is always redirected to vSphere Web client. If you want to use local authentication use http://vCloud-FQDN/cloud/login.jsp and type local or LDAP account (if LDAP is configured).
2. If you enabled SSO federation and the vCenter SSO is no longer available, you cannot unregister its lookup service. To do this go to vCloud database and in dbo.config table clear the lookupservice.url value.
3. In case you are using self-signed untrusted certificate on the vSphere web client some browsers (Firefox) might not display the Add Security Exception button when being redirected. Therefore open first the vSphere web client page directly, create the security exception and then the redirection from vCloud website should work.
4. HTTP ERROR 500. Problem accessing /cloud/saml/HoKSSO/alias/vcd. Reason: Error determining metadata contracts
….
Metadata for issuer https://xxx:7444/STS wasn’t found
This error might appear after the vSphere web client SSO authentication when the user is redirected back to vCloud portal. To understand this error let’s first talk about what is going on in the background. When the SSO federation is enabled, vCloud Director establishes trust with vCenter SSO. The trust is needed so the identity provider (SSO) knows that the request for authentication is not malicious (phishing) and also the service provider (vCloud Director) needs to be sure the reply comes from the right identity provider.
The trust is established when the federation is configured with metadata exchange that contains keys and some information about the other party. The SSO metadata can be seen in vCloud Director database in the dbo.saml_id_provider_settings table. Now during the actual authentication process if for some reason the security token reply comes from different source than the one expected based on the identity provider metadata, you will get this error.
This issue might happen for example if the vCenter SSO hostname has been changed. In this particular case which I encountered it happened on vCenter Server Appliance 5.1. The SSO has been initiated before the hostname was set. So the identity provider response came with metadata containing the issuer’s IP address instead FQDN which the service provider (VCD) expected based on the SSO endpoint address. The issuer information did not get updated after the hostname change.
The VCSA 5.1 the issuer information is stored in SSO PostgreSQL DB. These are the steps to change it:
- Get the SSO DB instance name, user and password
cat /usr/lib/vmware-sso/webapps/lookupservice/WEB-INF/classes/config.properties
db.type=postgres
db.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/ssodb
db.user=ssod
db.pass=rTjsz9PRPLOFswBkJTCNAAVp
`
- Connect to the DB with the password retrieved from the previous step (db.pass=…)
/opt/vmware/vpostgres/1.0/bin/psql ssodb -U ssod
Retrieve the STS issuer:
ssodb=> select issuer from ims_sts_config;
If the issuer is really incorrect update it with following command:
ssodb=> update ims_sts_config SET issuer='https://FQDN:7444/STS'
Note: I need to credit William Lam for helping me where to find the SSO DB password.
