"Machine already belongs to a deployment" failure when trying to onboard machines in Aria Automation

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When attempting to onboard machines in Aria Automation you get error:

Machine [<VMNAME1>] already belongs to a deployment.
Machine [<VMNAME2>] already belongs to a deployment....

• Under Cloud Assembly > Resources > Virtual Machines the machines do not show as 'Managed' or 'Deployed' but rather as 'Discovered' machines.
• No Deployment appears to have them as resources in the Aria Automation UI.

Environment

• VMware Aria Automation 8.x

Cause

• This can happen if the VM is still tied to the onboarding plan and needs a cleanup. 

Resolution

• To resolve the issue clean up the machines custom properties via Rest API to ensure there are no references to a deployment:

Prerequisites

• You have backups of the VMware Aria Automation 8.x appliance(s)
  • You must back up all VMware Aria Automation appliances, at the same time - simultaneously for all nodes.
  • If you are making the snapshots manually, you must start the snapshots of the second and the third node not more than 40 seconds after you start the snapshots for the first node.
  • When you back up the VMware Aria Automation appliance, disable in-memory snapshots and enable quiescing (quiescing is a requirement only for version 8.9 and newer).
• Acquire an Authentication Token

For more information, see Getting Your Authentication Token section in VMware Aria Automation Programming guide.

 

Procedure: Remove the stale entries using the REST API

 

1. Get the compute ID of the affected machines:

      GET https://AriaAutoFQDN/deployment/api/resources?search=VM-Name001

Note:

• • Replace AriaAutoFQDN with the FQDN of your Aria Automation environment.
  • Replace VM-Name001 with the affected VM name.
  • From the output take the ID, for example 67705272-418c-30a3-9b0d-eaf2eeedb117.
  • Use this ID as <compute id> below.

 

2. Invoke a GET API call to the following url to see the custom properties of the Machines.

      GET https://AriaAutoFQDN/provisioning/uerp/resources/compute/<compute_id>

3. In the body of the response search for the customProperties section of the VMs. If any of the following properties are populated with a value then remove the key-pair & values:

• Edit the customProperties map to remove the following key-value pairs:

 '__blueprint_resource_type'
 '__deployment_id'
 - '__composition_context_id'
 

Note: You must remove both key AND the value.

4. Invoke a PUT API request to the same url containing the updated request body with properties removed:

      PUT https://AriaAutoFQDN/provisioning/uerp/resources/compute/<compute_id>

 

5. Attempt again to onboard the machines.