Multi-tenant Aria Automation systems which share a common Orchestrator appliance among the different tenants: some tenants are not able to execute actions or workflows

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• New Aria Automation tenant with shared embedded Orchestrator cannot execute validation actions in the catalog
• This could be an external Orchestrator, or the embedded Orchestrator in the Automation host
• Getting banner error,  "Some data cannot be retrieved. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator."

Environment

VMware Aria Automation / Orchestrator 8.x

Cause

• Multiple tenants sharing the same Orchestrator is not generally desired, as tenants are typically to be fully separated
• If separate tenants use the same Orchestrator, they will be able to see, change or delete each other's workflows, actions, etc.
• It is also possible for one tenant to "hog" the Orchestrator's resources, causing service outage for their peers.
• Therefore using a shared Orchestrator, doesn't work by default and needs to be enabled by setting a custom property (see below)

Resolution

It's not expected that customers will want to break tenancy separation in this manner.
Where the tenants belong to different organizations, they would generally not want their workflows & actions to be seen by other tenants outside the org.

If you do want to share the same Orchestrator resources across tenants, it can be enabled by running this command:

vracli vro properties set -k "com.vmware.o11n.allow-non-default-org-login" -v true

Additional Information

To prevent the sharing of Orchestrator resources across tenants, implement one of the following solutions:

• Deploy a dedicated external Aria Automation Orchestrator appliance for each tenant.

• Upgrade the environment to VCF Automation 9.x, which natively enforces complete resource isolation between All Apps Organizations.

For further configuration details and architectural constraints, refer to the following documentation: Understanding VCF Automation All Apps Organization Multi Tenancy Model