Disks are not getting linked with a virtual machine upon onboarding multiple disks in vRA 8.4 and later

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
Upon onboarding VMs with multiple disks, you will notice the below behavior:

1. Disks of the virtual machine are not associated with the machine itself.
2. In the topology section, disks are shown as connected to the VM.
3. In vSphere, disks are associated/connected with the machine.
4. Upon resizing the disk, it picks up the correct disks.
5. Only the OS disk will be listed inside the VM, while the data disks are shown outside the VM.

The symptoms above are noticeable in Grid view only, while the Topology view works fine.

Environment

VMware vRealize Automation 8.x
VMware vRealize Automation 8.4.x

Cause

When you provision a machine with multiple disks from a vSphere template, the disks will not show up on the canvas or the grid because they are part of the template, and vRA is aware of it.

When you onboard a discovered machine with multiple attached disks, vRA does not know if the disks came from a vSphere template or have been attached later (somehow). Thus, vRA will onboard them as individual components, and they will be visible as Disk X in the grid and Disk_X_Machine_ABC on the topology view.

The cause for this is how vRA presents the data to users:
Disk X (vSphere) <- Disk X (vRA Provisioning Database) <- Disk_X_Machine_ABC (Catalog Service). In the grid, you see object names from the Provisioning service database (provisioning resources), and in the topology, you see names from the catalog service database (catalog resources). Catalog resources are wrappers around provisioning resources.

Resolution

This is by design and working as expected.

Dependency identification between objects in the Deployments Grid is not possible unless you navigate to the topology view.