java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: sun/security/ssl/SupportedEllipticCurvesExtension

This is looks to be the same issue as this bug, which is caused by a change in Java 8 162, where that class was renamed. Which was a fix for this bug in OpenJDK which was changed here, but unfortunately that was a breaking change that introduced this issue as they renaming the class.

An alternative is to use Payara 5.182, a fork of glassfish which includes a fix for it.

I looked into the bug mentioned by @Jonathan Coustick in his answer. The root of the problem is that Glassfish (or Payara) uses an old version of grizzly. So, I thought maybe replacing grizzly-npn-bootstrap.jar with a newer version would solve the problem.

This JAR file is located in <glassfish-root>/glassfish/modules/endorsed directory (for GlassFish server) <payara-root>/glassfish/lib directory (for Payara server). Versions prior to 1.7 are subject to this error . So, I got the latest version (currently, 1.9) from maven.org, and it worked like a charm.

Here's the download link.