I am installing the vCenter SSO 5.5u2b in an HA configuration. When installing the first node i used a generated password that was 20 characters long and consisted of lower, upper, and numbers for the administrator@vsphere.local account. Everything went smoothly and i moved on to the installation of the second node. When the second node asked me the installation scenario i selected "High Availability" and on the next page put in the primary node FQDN and the password for the administrator@vsphere.local that i configured on node 1. On the certificate page, upon clicking the "Continue" button i got a popup stating: "Failed to establish a secure connection with the remote server".
Looking at the installation logs i saw the errors:
SSO_SETUP_ERROR_MSG = Failed to establish a secure connection to remote server
VMware Single Sign-On-build-2175557: 11/21/14 10:25:52 --- CustomAction execution: VmSetupValidatePartnerInfo
VMware Single Sign-On-build-2175557: 11/21/14 10:25:52 LDAP Utils : VmSetupMakeLdapsConnection
VMware Single Sign-On-build-2175557: 11/21/14 10:25:52 Attempting ldap_sslinit...
VMware Single Sign-On-build-2175557: 11/21/14 10:25:52 Attempting ldap_connect...
VMware Single Sign-On-build-2175557: 11/21/14 10:25:52 Attempting ldap_bind_s...
VMware Single Sign-On-build-2175557: 11/21/14 10:25:52 Unable to make LDAPS connection. Error :1326
After searching around i found several other community posts regarding password issues, they all looked to be resolved in this version so i ignored them. I then read through the vCenter 5.5 install docs and in the prerequisite section for SSO i saw that the password for the administrator@vsphere.local account REQUIRED the use of lower, upper, number, AND special character.
I updated the administrator@vsphere.local password using the vdcadmintool.exe application, which created a password that met the requirements. Going back to node2 and using the new password everything worked as expected.