"Unable to place the vApp in the VDC" when creating a VM/vApp in VMware Cloud Director

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• In the UI, when creating a new VM/vApp, the task fails with the following error:

[ <request-ID> ] Unable to place the vApp

• Deploying empty VMs with or without network card fails with the same error.
• Deploying VMs from vApp Templates also fails with the same error.
• NSX-V or NSX-T is not deployed.
• Elastic feature is enabled on the Organization VDC to which the VM is being deployed.
• Multiple clusters back the Provider VDC.
• In the /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-debug.log you see an entry such as

ERROR | Backend-activity-pool-4 | PlacementServiceFacade    | Error while preparing hub
...
activity=(com.vmware.vcloud.vdc.impl.ComposeRecomposeVAppActivity,urn:uuid:<ACTIVITY_UUID>)
java.lang.NullPointerException
   at com.vmware.vcloud.networking.model.dfw.DistributedFirewallFactory.nsxVDistributedFirewall(DistributedFirewallFactory.java:50)
   at com.vmware.vcloud.networking.services.dfw.DistributedFirewallImpl.updateDistributedFirewallScope(DistributedFirewallImpl.java:40)
...
   at com.vmware.vcloud.fabric.compute.vrp.GenericVirtualResourcePool.updateDistributedFirewallForVdc(GenericVirtualResourcePool.java:2538)
   at com.vmware.vcloud.fabric.compute.vrp.GenericVirtualResourcePool.getOrCreateResourcePoolOnHubInternal(GenericVirtualResourcePool.java:2517)

• Organization VDC resource pool entries are missing in the Cloud Director database even though they exist in vCenter inventory.

Environment

10.x

Cause

This is a known issue in Cloud director 10.3 environments without NSX(V or T). The requirement to have NSX backing for Provider VDC is not present from 10.3 onwards. This issue occurs due to an incorrect validation carried out for NSX-V or NSX-T even though both are not used with the affected Organization VDCs.

Resolution

This issue will be resolved in future releases of VMware Cloud Director.

Workaround:

1. Disable the Organization VDC elasticity. Please refer to the documentation General System Settings and Flex Allocation Model
2. Disable the secondary resource pools backing the Provider VDC. Please refer to the documentation Enable or Disable a Resource Pool on a Provider Virtual Data Center

 

Resolution:

1. Perform Database modification to insert the missing Organization VDC resource pool entries.