Aria Automation deployments utilizing the content library fail if the deployments take longer than 15 minutes to provision in vCenter

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

To provide steps to resolve an issue that may be encountered on Content Library based deployments.

Symptoms:
When provisioning VMs using templates from vCenter content library, the requests fail in Aria Automation with the following error:

Provisioning operation failed. Error deploying from library: [: java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: : [POST] [https://vcenter.server/rest/vcenter/vm-template/library-items/a85a9e42?action=deploy] [[accept: application/json; charset=utf-8, connection: Keep-Alive, cookie: vmware-api-session-id=a0b, vmware-api-session-id: a0be]]: Failed in ApiAsyncClient with exception: [org.apache.http.ConnectionClosedException: Connection is closed

Environment

VMware vRealize Automation 8.x

Cause

This is caused by the internal Aria Automation proxy connection timing out the vAPI connection to vCenter. The internal proxy service of Aria Automation has a default active connection timeout of 15 minutes.

If it takes more than 15 minutes for a VM to be deployed in vCenter, the proxy connection is closed resulting in the failure of the deployment request.

The provisioning-service-app.log would show the following error:

2023-08-10T19:27:59.005Z ERROR provisioning [host='provisioning-service-app-6fccd' thread='I/O dispatcher 4' user='' org='' trace='' parent='' span=''] c.v.p.c.m.a.v.r.cis.ApiAsyncClient.failed - [POST] [https://vcenter.server/rest/vcenter/vm-template/library-items/a85a9e42?action=deploy] [[accept: application/json; charset=utf-8, connection: Keep-Alive, cookie: vmware-api-session-id=a0b, vmware-api-session-id: a0be]]: Failed in ApiAsyncClient with exception: [org.apache.http.ConnectionClosedException: Connection is closed

Resolution

Increase the connection timeout of the internal Aria Automation proxy service from the default 15 minutes to something appropriate to the longer running VM deployments in the environment.

1. SSH into the vRA appliance
2. Run the command:

  vracli proxy show

This will show the current connection timeout
3. Run the commands below to change the timeout:

  vracli proxy set --read-timeout <minutes>
  vracli proxy apply

4. Run the command to confirm that the setting has been applied

  vracli proxy show