How to enable vCenter cluster compatibility validation in Aria Automation placement.

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Aria Automation is insufficiently aware of infrastructure capabilities which could lead to not optimal placement decisions. The customers have some options to fill that gap today, for example by creating a project with a small number of compatible clusters or by using tags. One additional option with Aria Automation 8.18.1 is to perform cluster compatibility validation early during the placement phase, avoiding attempts to create a VM on a cluster that is known to vCenter to be incompatible with that VM's configuration (for example, attempting to deploy a VM image compatible with ESX8+ on a cluster containing only ESX7 hosts).

This article provides steps to enable vCenter cluster compatibility validation in Aria Automation placement flow.

Environment

VMware Aria Automation 8.18.1

Resolution

• Enabling vCenter cluster compatibility validation requires activation of few configuration properties. Note: Before enabling this feature, ensure that vCenter clusters which are part of the placement zone(s) used for provisioning are DRS-enabled; this can be verified in vSphere Web Client UI.
      
      1. Open Aria Automation Assembler UI and navigate to Configuration Properties page https://{aria-automation-host}/automation/#/service/automation-ui/provisioning-ui;ash=%2FconfigurationProperties
      2. Add / modify the following configuration properties:
          2a. property: ENABLE_VCENTER_COMPATIBILITY_CHECK with value: true
                when activated, the compute allocation flow will perform additional cluster compatibility checks through the vCenter compatibility check API
          2b. property: ENABLE_VCENTER_COMPATIBILITY_CHECK_VM_TEMPLATE with value: true
                when activated together with ENABLE_VCENTER_COMPATIBILITY_CHECK, the compute allocation flow will perform additional cluster compatibility checks for all VMs provisioned using VM templates
          2c. property: ENABLE_VCENTER_COMPATIBILITY_CHECK_VM_SNAPSHOT with value: true
                when activated together with ENABLE_VCENTER_COMPATIBILITY_CHECK, the compute allocation flow will perform additional cluster compatibility checks for all VMs provisioned using VM snapshots
          2d. property: ENABLE_VCENTER_COMPATIBILITY_CHECK_CL_VM_TEMPLATE with value: true
                when activated together with ENABLE_VCENTER_COMPATIBILITY_CHECK, the compute allocation flow will perform additional cluster compatibility checks for all VMs provisioned using VM templates from Content Libraries
              
   Notes:

  • All four properties are boolean properties, which can be activated by setting their value to true, and deactivated by setting their value to false (or entirely removing the property)
  • Properties' names/values are case-sensitive

  When the property ENABLE_VCENTER_COMPATIBILITY_CHECK plus one or more of the other three properties are activated, the feature will be automatically enabled, and all subsequent deployment requests for VMs whose image type matches the type controlled by the enabled properties will perform additional vCenter compatibility checks. If the currently selected cluster gets flagged by those checks as incompatible, the check will be retried automatically for another cluster within the same placement zone, until either 1) a compatible cluster is found and actual provisioning is allocated to that cluster, or 2) all clusters within the placement zone are checked and flagged as incompatible, in which case the entire deployment request will fail.

  In both cases, troubleshooting information, including response/error messages from vCenter validations will be available in request diagram view.
      
  Note: There is a couple of known issues/limitations

  • In environments with large number (100+) of concurrent deployment requests, enabling this feature may cause some of the requests to fail with timeout.
  • Deployments from template containing the following properties will fail
    • •  remoteAccess: authentication: generatedPublicPrivateKey