Onboarding Aria automation deployed VM's fails with ' resource limits have been reached' error but the configured resource limits have space.

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• The VM you are trying to onboard was once deployed from Aria automation and then unregistered for some reason.
• The deployed VM used a cloud template that used Aria Automation secrets as part of its YAML. You can confirm by going to discovered VM's custom properties and see if you can find an entry that references a secret.
• The issue occurs only if the 'Use Placements' option is enabled in the onboarding plan.

Example error message:
"1 of 1 deployments failed since resource limits have been reached. In order to retry onboarding the failed deployments, increase the project limits or policy limits. We suggest increasing the limit by an amount that will accommodate your organization's future usage. After increasing the affected limit, retry onboarding the resources. (less)"

 

Environment

VMware Aria Automation 8.x

Cause

Caused by encrypted custom property which was left in the compute state from the previous deployment.
Example affected blueprint configuration, where password is used:
inputs:
  password:
    type: string
    encrypted: true
    title: Administrator Password
    description: Set a password for the new local administrator user

Then password is used in the cloudConfig

      cloudConfig: |
        #cloud-config
         write_files:
             - path: C:\tmp\adminuser.txt
               content: ${input.password}

Resolution

VMware engineering is aware of this issue and it will be fixed in a future version (VCF 9.1) where VM unregister will remote these custom properties.

Workaround:
As a workaround, you can try:
1. Onboarding from Assembler -> Resources -> Virtual Machines -> Discovered
You can initiate an onboarding from here. Note this is a quick onboarding and will not reflect against resource limits.

2. If you need resource limits to be counted against; do the above step, then unregister the VM again and re-onboard using the onboarding plan with the 'Use placements' option enabled. 

This will succeed as the quick onboarding disregards the custom properties from the VM and hence it is not an issue when re-onboarding using the onboarding plan.