VMM 2016 and Network Controller certificate Issue’s

Since near the end of last year I was blessed with some hardware to test al lot of new features and stuff of Windows Server 2016, System Center 2016 and Azure Stack. Last week I experienced an issue with my Network Controller VM’s. In the end it turned out to be more of a VMM issue I think. But I wanted to share this with the world in case somebody else experienced this issue and does google for nothing because there is nothing to find about this issue.

Problem

I did the network controller and SLB Mux setup several weeks ago and all was running fine while all of a sudden I couldn’t change stuff in VMM anymore. Almost every action I did triggered this error:

Error (21426)
Execution of :: on the configuration provider  failed. Detailed exception: Unable to connect to the network service. Check connection string and network connectivity. Execution of Microsoft.SystemCenter.NetworkService::OpenDeviceConnectionEx on the configuration provider 3e2875a7-5831-4fb2-b388-1672e1c20fee failed. Detailed exception: System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException: An error occurred while sending the request. ---> System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel. ---> System.Security.Authentication.AuthenticationException: The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure.
Check the documentation for the configuration provider or contact the publisher support.
Unable to connect to the network service. Check connection string and network connectivity.

Recommended Action
Check the documentation for the configuration provider or contact the publisher support.

Troubleshooting

So I did a bunch of tests and troubleshooting on the Network Controller VM but al was running fine there. Also VMM was able to acces the network controller and the certificates in use were all trusted and valid so I had no idea what the problem was, but it’s something between the VMM server and the Network Controller. I started to remove components that were depending on the network controller to re-add it but this was not possible because you need the Network Controller for that and VMM was not able to reach it. So I was really stuck here! 🙁

I thought ok, lets re-add it then, so I started the Add Network Service wizard and walked my way through the wizard. Provided a name, connection string and it discovered the network controller and it’s certificate

In the next screen scanned for the provider and it found several components

Targeted a host group next, next and finish and off cours another error stating that the network Service is already added, yes i knew that but I was hopping to update something and… IT DID!

I am guessing the part were the certificate is imported again made my problem disappear. Because after running the wizard and failing to re-apply the network service it started to communicate and I could refresh the netwerk service and refresh hosts and could change stuff again 🙂

Hope this is useful for anyone experiencing this issue.

Best regards,
Pascal Slijkerman