vCloud Director: VXLAN preparation fails “Cannot complete the operation”

While configuring VXLAN on VMware  vSphere 5.1 I ran into an issue, the installation of the VXLAN agent on the ESXi hosts fails with the message “Cannot complete the operation. See the event log for details”:

A short investigation showed the following messages in the /var/log/esxupdate.log on the ESXi server:

2012-12-27T14:15:46Z esxupdate: downloader: DEBUG: Downloading http://vcenter.brainstorm.local:80/eam/vib?id=d4c56cae-5069-4878-9d22-46e47e1e1955-0 to /tmp/tmpK8Qm_K...

It seems there was a problem with downloading the vib which is required for using VXLAN.

The solution

The ESXi host is connecting the vCenter Server on port 80, but by default this (outbound) port is disabled on the ESXi Server. After enabling the port, the installation ran without any problem:

It’s a bit strange I had to configure this firewall rule manually for the installation. After the installation is completed you can disable the rule.

If you still cannot deploy the VXLAN VIB, an alternative is to install it using Update Manager. Marco over at vclouds.nl published an article on this.