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Overview
You have deployed a virtual appliance and you find that it is not showing up in the Umbrella Dashboard under Deployment >Configuration > Sites & Active Directory. Additionally, you find that the virtual appliance's console shows the sync process is disabled, and that the Updates test has failed, as shown below:
Tabbing over to the Updates: GET failed test and hitting Enter reveals the following information:
Resolution
The behavior shown above indicates that the virtual appliances were not deployed according to the existing documentation.
If you are deploying your virtual appliances in VMWare and witness the behavior listed above, be sure to not make any changes to the OVA file archive or the OVF template that is included in that archive. Deploy the OVF template exactly as it is shown in the documentation here: https://docs.umbrella.com/deployment-umbrella/docs/deploy-vas-in-vmware
If you are deploying the virtual appliances in Hyper-V, please pay special attention to the section around importing both hard disks as shown in the documentation : https://docs.umbrella.com/deployment-umbrella/docs/deploy-vas-in-hyper-v-for-windows-2012
Technical Detail
The virtual appliances are downloaded from the Umbrella Dashboard as file archives (.ova for VMWare, .zip for Hyper-V). Extracting from these archives should reveal the following files:
VMWare:
- forwarder-va.vmdk (hard disk)
- dynamic.vmdk (hard disk)
- forwarder-va.ovf (descriptor file)
- forwarder-va.mf (manifest file)
Hyper-V:
- Virtual Hard Disks\forwarder-va.vhd (hard disk)
- Virtual Hard Disks\dynamic.vhd (hard disk)
- config.xml (configuration file)
- Virtual Machines\[ALPHANUMERIC STRING].exp (export file)
The first hard disk listed for each platform, forwarder-va.vmdk and forwarder-va.vhd, contain the DNS forwarder software that takes in client DNS queries and forwards them on to Umbrella Anycast resolvers. This disk also contains the sync process that periodically checks in with the Umbrella API.
The second hard disk listed for each platform, dynamic.vmdk and dynamic.vhd, contain organization-specific information that is required by the virtual appliance's sync process. If the virtual appliance's sync process, located on the forwarder-va hard disk, does not have the information on the dynamic disk available, then it is unable to sync with the Umbrella API and the process remains disabled. Additionally, the virtual appliance never registers with the Umbrella Dashboard, and it will continue to fail the Updates test shown in the aforementioned screenshots.