vSphere machine recreation during deployment update in Aria Automation

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• making a change on a property like CPU or RAM triggers the vSphere machine recreation instead of an update
• the VM recreation may fail due to a mismatch between cloud template and deployment or even a different issue
• Deployments using custom Day2 actions may lose property values like image, causing subsequent updates to fail or recreate the VM
• The vSphere tasks show "Delete virtual machine" followed by "Deploy OVF template" during a simple configuration update

Environment

Aria Automation 8.x

Cause

Specific properties in the Cloud.vSphere.Machine schema are flagged with recreateOnUpdate: true. If these properties are modified in the template or are missing/null in the deployment's stored state, the engine mandates a recreation to reconcile the difference.

Resolution

1. Identify Triggering Properties: Review the Cloud Template for changes to the following properties, which trigger recreation:
   
   
   • image or imageRef
   • customizationSpec
   • folderName
   • snapshotLimit
   • constraints (Array and each property change is impacted)
   • networks (Array and below properties are impacted)
     
     • assignPublicIpAddress
     • assignIPv6Address
     • assignment
   • ovfProperties (Array not directly impacted, only properties below are impacted)
     • key
     • value
   • cloudConfigSettings (not directly impacted, only properties below are impacted)
     • phoneHomeShouldWait
     • phoneHomeTimeoutSeconds
     • phoneHomeFailOnTimeout
     • deploymentFailOnCloudConfigRuntimeError
       
       
   You can also use API with expand as true, to populate old/new properties:
   

   GET /blueprint/api/blueprint-requests/{requestId}/resources-plan?apiVersion=2019-09-12&$expand=true 

   
   
   
2. Verify Stored State: If no changes were made to these properties, verify the internal resource state. If the image property was lost during a custom action, it must be restored to match the template.
   
   
3. Template Adjustment: The property "network > assignment" can be removed from the cloud template if a static IP is assigned later during provisioning.