I have been trying to set up vCloud Networking and Security (vShield) in my lab which is running vSphere 5.1 so that I can set up and play with the latest version of vCloud Director. I had originally set up an earlier version of vShield but decided to upgrade to 5.1. I went the rip and replace route which I promptly screwed up by forgetting to un-registering vShield with vCenter before I blew away the vShield Manager appliance. Oops! Lesson learned. Un-register your plug-ins. I corrected this mistake by going through the plug-in removal process as laid out in this VMware KB : http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1025360.
But now, I have a problem: I have managed to get the new vShield Manager up and running and have successfully registered it with my lab vCenter. However, when I go to the vShield tab so that I can install vShield App onto my hosts, vCenter displays the status for vShield App under the Installed column as: Previous installation had error. Has anyone ever seen this before? Being a fan of VMware's non-descript errors my first thought was, "What does that mean? That tells me nothing useful!" I tried to clear this error out by un-registering vShield Manager from vCenter, restarting vCenter and then restarting my hosts but the problem still persists. The only thing that seems to make sense to me is that vCenter is, for some reason, still seeing the old installation of vShield which should be gone. Is it possible that some remnant of vShield is residing on the hosts and this is what is causing me so much pain?
I would really like to avoid having to blow away vCenter and redeploying it, or even worse having to start over at the host level from scratch. This is a lab environment so that is an option but one I would like to avoid none the less.
Any suggestions?