Quick Tip - vSAN ESA Cluster Health Check returns Error message: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

A fellow colleague was having some problems with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) CLI Installer when using the vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) bootstrap method, which automatically the configures vSAN ESA on a physical ESXi host before deploying the VCSA on top of the vSAN ESA Datastore.

Whether he manually downloaded the vSAN JSON HCL or generated his own custom vSAN ESA HCL, the VCSA Installer would fail with the following error:

Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

While I have had success with the "manual" approach to bootstraping vSAN ESA on single ESXi host before deploying the VCSA, I have not used the VCSA Installer method for vSAN ESA. Since I had an ASUS NUC 14 Pro already setup with latest ESXi 8.0 Update 3b, it was easy for me to give this workflow a try and sure enough, I ran into the same error, which is where the screenshot from above came from.

There was some assumption that maybe vSAN JSON HCL was not being validated with unsupported hardware, especially since my ASUS NUC 14 Pro had consumer grade NVMe, but the error message persisted regardless of the vSAN JSON HCL used. To ensure that VCSA Installer would not attempt to reach out and grab the latest vSAN JSON HCL, I decided to block or rather mimic a "block" to vSAN Health Check service which is vsanhealth.vmware.com by adding the following entry to my local systems hosts file that is running the VCSA Installer:

127.0.0.1 vsanhealth.vmware.com

To my surprise, once I hosts entry was added to basically direct the endpoint to localhost, which would mean it would not have success to reaching the vSAN JSON HCL and would simply use the one provided, the VCSA Installer continued and not only passed the vSAN Health Check but started the deployment!

I suspect the issue is with the endpoint that vSAN Health Check service is attempting to contact and maybe due to some of the URL endpoints changing as part of the Day 2 transition from VMware to Broadcom backend systems. There is an SR tracking this problem as this may also be observed for those deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with vSAN ESA as it also uses the exact same VCSA Installer and this trick may also work by adding host entry to either the Cloud Builder or SDDC Manager component.