Install VMware PSC fails: vdcsetupldu failed. Error [9234] – User invalid credentials

I was setting-up a redundant VMware PSC setup stretching 2 datacenters. Every datacenter has 2 PSC and an load balancer.

Eventually, the virtual machines who run the PSC services, will run in a management cluster consisting of 3 nodes. These nodes are using Virtual SAN (VSAN) for storage.

I first installed 1 node with VMware vSphere and created on one of the SAS disks a datastore. Later on, the VMs will be moved to a VSAN datastore.

The first datacenter went as expected. No problems. But the second datacenter the installation of the PSC software failed with an error: Encountered an internal error
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Looking in the logfile vmafd-firstbood-py-xxxx_stderr.log, vdcsetupldu failed with Error [9234] – User invalid credential

I was sure that the password provided was ok. Diving deeper into the log files, I found that after installation, VMware Identity services starts and the install tries to make a LDAP connection on TCP 389, who would fail. I created a PowerShell script that would check TCP 389 every 5 seconds. I find out that eventually, I could make a connection on TCP 389, but the install already gave up.

Ok, so the services will start, but too late.

Looking at ESXTOP (best troubleshooting program for ESXi), I saw, that when the VMware Identity services start, the disk latency went up to 100ms. Could it be that the disk is slowing down the virtual machine, so that the installation would fail? I moved the virtual machine to a SSD disk, restart the installation, and guess what. Install successful.

So, probably the PSC installation program does not check if the service is available, before trying to login. I will fail, saying that the credentials are not valid, rather than saying that it cannot make a connection.[/expand]