Issue while connecting to SSL-protected kafka

Greetings!
I am currently having trouble while creating kafka-cluster with host being protected by ssl.

To create a cluster, I am using the next command:
/opt/vertica/packages/kafka/bin/vkconfig cluster --create --cluster Cluster1 --hosts hostname1:9093' --config-schema config_schema --ssl-ca-alias ca-alias --ssl-key-alias key-alias --ssl-key-password key-password --enable-ssl true --username username --conf config.properties

And I am getting the next error:
Exception in thread "main" com.vertica.solutions.kafka.exception.ConfigurationException: ERROR: [Could not connect to cluster] at com.vertica.solutions.kafka.model.StreamCluster.validateConfiguration(StreamCluster.java:149) at com.vertica.solutions.kafka.model.StreamCluster.setFromMapAndValidate(StreamCluster.java:107) at com.vertica.solutions.kafka.model.StreamModel.<init>(StreamModel.java:89) at com.vertica.solutions.kafka.model.StreamCluster.<init>(StreamCluster.java:39) at com.vertica.solutions.kafka.cli.ClusterCLI.getNewModel(ClusterCLI.java:47) at com.vertica.solutions.kafka.cli.ClusterCLI.getNewModel(ClusterCLI.java:13) at com.vertica.solutions.kafka.cli.CLI.run(CLI.java:56) at com.vertica.solutions.kafka.cli.CLI._main(CLI.java:132) at com.vertica.solutions.kafka.cli.ClusterCLI.main(ClusterCLI.java:19)

Also, I have tried specifying those parameters in .properties file. And I have tried included all the necessary Djavax params (namely trustStore, keyStore and keyStorePassword) in vkconfig JAVA_OPTS.

Kafka broker connection string is correct, I've checked it via console consumer/producer.
vkafka-sched.log does not show any errors, and only tells that it had received jks keystore.
Could someone please give me a piece of advice on what am I doing incorrectly in that situation.

Best regards,
Tripathi