Last week my new home lab components arrived and it was time to build the home lab. A vSphere environment would not be complete without vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Operations, so the home lab would also feature these solutions.

When deploying these solutions you could run into a problem with network connectivity after the initial deployment. When specifying the network configuration in the ‘Deploy OVF Template’ wizard, you have the option to either specify the netmask value or subnet prefix.

The documentation is in my opinion not very clear about what you should use, but the wizard accepts both the netmask (eg. 255.255.255.0) and the prefix.

After you have deployed the appliance and used the subnet prefix in the network configuration, the appliance wil have no network connectivity. You will not be able to reach the appliance, not even from the same subnet.

Even a simple ping from the appliance to the gateway will fail with a network unreachable.

It appears that although the wizard accepts the use if the subnet prefix, the appliance does not. The wizard does not translate the subnet prefix to the correct netmask value but just uses it in the configuration. The appliance will use whatever you have configured in the wizard.

Since the appliance is using SUSE Linux as the Operating System, it was relatively simple to identify the problem. SUSE only accepts the netmask value in the network configuration and not the subnet prefix!

I just powered off and removed the appliance, and deployed a new appliance. This time with the netmask value in the wizard.

The network configuration of the appliance now used the netmask value entered in the wizard.

After deploying and powering on the appliance, it is possible to connect to the GUI of the appliace.

TLDR; when deployig an OVA through the deployment wizard, use the netmask value in the network configuration and not the subnet prefix. This behavior has been verified for vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Operations but I expect this will be the same for other VMware appliances.