"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 machine's 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 third node no 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 the Getting Your Authentication Token section in the 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 (e.g., 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, remove the key-value pairs:

   Set to null for the following links:

   • descriptionLink
   • orgAuthLink
   • projectAuth
   • ownerAuthLink

   For example: descriptionLink: " "

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

   • __composition_context_id
   • __deployment_id
   • __component_type_id
   • __blueprint_resource_id
   • __groupResourcePlacementLink
   • __relocation_origin

   Note: You must remove both the key and the value.

   Remove from tenantLinks where XXX are values specific to the machine:

   • /owner/provisioning/auth/csp/users/XXX
   • /provisioning/resources/projects/XXX

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.

If the previous instructions do not work, proceed to Manually unregister an onboarded machine from a deployment in case of an unregister action failure as next steps.