Aria Automation deployment fails and the vCenter task shows an error message "Illegal character in path at index at index ##: ds:///vmfspath/to/vmdk.vmdk"

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Aria Automation deployment results in "Create Failed" with an error message in the User Events tab showing:

Provisioning operation failed.  Cannot deploy library item ###-###-### ( vapi.bindings.method.impl.unexpected.com.vmware.ovfs.ovfs-main.ovfs.unexpected_error_no_message Provider method implementation threw unexpected exception: com.vmware.vapi.std.errors.InternalServerError: Unexpected error)

Deploy OVF template task in vCenter may shows an error:

Failed to deploy OVF package.  ThrowableProxycause: A general runtime error occurred.  An error occurred: java.net.URISyntaxException: illegal character in path at index ##: ds:///vmfs/volumes/####-###-###/Example[0]/Example[0].vmdk

Attempts to use the same Virtual Machine Template from the vCenter Web Client to deploy a test VM with a valid name using valid characters works fine.
Attempts to deploy a Cloud Template from Aria Automation using the same Virtual Machine Template in vCenter and a name with valid characters works fine.

Environment

Aria Automation 8.18.x
vCenter 8.x

Cause

This is caused by the name of the VM being sent to vCenter by Aria Automation having invalid characters like brackets in the name ( [ , ] ), which are invalid characters for a datastore ds:/// URI, which will cause template deployment failure, because the process uses a datastore ds:/// URI.

Resolution

Examine the reason Aria Automation is attempting to deploy a VM with invalid characters in the name.