REST Hosts defined with vRealize Orchestrator's REST plugin periodically disappear causing provisioning workflow failures

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• You leverage vRealize Orchestrator Git integrations to push content between instances using a repository.
• REST hosts previously defined within the REST plugin disappear
• A provisioning workflow failure occurs as REST Operations are leveraged during other workflow operations

Environment

VMware vRealize Orchestrator 8.x

Cause

• vRealize Orchestrator uses a third party component, jGit, to create, update and/or manage the git repository.
• jGit marks a committed file that was later added to gitignore as deleted.
  • Diff calculations within .gitignore have no effect on committed files in a subfolder
• This has the unintended consequence of modifying the REST Host plugin definitions when imported into another vRealize Orchestrator 8.0 - 8.2 environment.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in vRealize Orchestrator 8.3 and jGit 5.9.0.

Workaround:

• Manually push all outstanding local changes to your remote repository. 
• Ensure the REST Host locations were corrected in vRealize Orchestrator.
  • This will eliminate any pending changes that should have been ignored but were not due to the known issue in jGit.

Additional Information

The HTTP-REST plug-in allows you to manage REST Web services by providing interaction between vRealize Orchestrator and REST hosts. You can define REST services and their operations as inventory objects by running configuration workflows, and perform REST operations on the defined objects.

Impact/Risks:
vRealize Orchestrator 8.0 - 8.2 environments not leveraging external Git repository synchronization will not be impacted.