While I was installing VMware Cloud Director 10.3 in my home lab, I have received the error “OS Configuration Phase has failed.”. This happened as I tried to access the configuration page at https://<My VCD IP>:5480 at the first reboot after deploying the appliance from an OVA.

Here is a screenshot of the actual error:

Checking the /opt/vmware/var/log/firstboot as instructed in the error, and I found:

2021-10-27 17:33:16 | Updating /etc/hosts file ...
2021-10-27 17:33:16 | System hostname is: photon-machine
2021-10-27 17:33:16 | [ERROR] Hostname was not updated via dns reverse-lookup. Failing OS configuration phase.
2021-10-27 17:33:16 | [ERROR] Fix and verify DNS server info and other related networking settings, and redeploy this appliance again.

Here is a screenshot of the file output:

From the error, it was easy to spot it was a DNS issue. Checking my DNS server and I have found out that I have missed configuring the DNS record for my VCD instance. You will need to add a forward and reverse DNS records for you VCD Cells to your DNS server and this should fix the issue.

Though to share in case others face the problem as they get sloppy configuring their home lab late at night :).