Standalone Aria Automation Orchestrator instances do not leave evaluation mode when point to VMware Managed Cloud vCenter instances

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

• You are deploying a new standalone Automation Orchestrator appliance.
• You have pointed the authentication provider to a vCenter instance hosted in VMC
• Automation Orchestrator never leaves evaluation mode.
• Manual application of another license does not change evaluation mode.
• Logs have messages similar to the following:
  com.vmware.o11n.service.license.retriever.LicenseComplianceRetriever - Error occurred during license compliance retrieval.
java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot read the array length because "array" is null

Environment

VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.x

Resolution

This is by design.

VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator has not been validated to support Cloud based vCenters in VMC as the authentication provider.

Note: vSphere+ is an ESX specific license and is not intended for this use case.

Recommendation:

• Use an on-premises vCenter 7.x/8.x instance as the authentication source.
• Use an on-premises VMware Aria Automation 8.x as the authentication source.