Error: "hubs were removed due to the following: Does not contain any suitable ESXi hosts. Rejected Hubs" occurs during VM reconfigure operation

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

• Reconfiguration of an existing virtual machine or vApp fails.
• The virtual machine/vApp is part of a DRS VM-Host affinity or anti-affinity rule.
• Within the log file /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-debug.log you see entries indicating that no ESXi host is identified as a suitable placement location. The array returned is empty with no results inside [ ]. The log also shows how the decision filtering has been based on a strong affinity check.

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS,482 | DEBUG    | task-service-activity-pool-1411 | HostLevelPlacementFinder       | Candidate hosts after filtering by strong vm group affinities: [].Vm groups filtered: [VM_host_affinity_group_name] | 

Additionally in the same log file entries similar to the following are seen:

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS,814 | DEBUG    | task-service-activity-pool-1411 | CJob                           | updateFailedJob(com.vmware.vcloud.api.presentation.service.InternalServerErrorException) with locale=es_ES | requestId=<requestId>,request=POST https://vcloud.example.com/api/vApp/vm-<uuid>/action/reconfigureVm,requestTime=1741084334032,remoteAddress=<ipaddress>,userAgent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 ...,accept=application/*+xml;version 39.0.0-alpha vcd=<uuid>,task=<taskid> activity=(com.vmware.vcloud.backendbase.management.system.TaskActivity,urn:uuid:<uuid>)com.vmware.vcloud.api.presentation.service.InternalServerErrorException: The operation failed because no suitable resource was found. Out of 1 candidate hubs:
        1 hubs were removed due to the following: Does not contain any suitable ESXi hosts. Rejected Hubs: resgroup-<id>
        at com.vmware.vcloud.placement.PlacementExceptionHandler.convertPlacementException(PlacementExceptionHandler.java:78)
...
...
Caused by: com.vmware.pbm.placement.PlacementException: PlacementException NO_FEASIBLE_PLACEMENT_SOLUTION
        at com.vmware.vcloud.placement.engine.impl.PlacementSolverImpl.constructPlacementException(PlacementSolverImpl.java:138)

Environment

VMware Cloud Director 10.5.x

VMware Cloud Director 10.6.x

Cause

This issue can occur if the associated VM-host affinity/anti-affinity rule is configured as a "should" rule type within vCenter Server. 

Cloud Director requires that "must" rules are used on the VM-Host affinity/anti-affinity rule.

• For Affinity rules use "Must run on hosts in group"
• For Anti-Affinity rules use"Must not run on hosts in group"

Resolution

To resolve the issue ensure that "must" rules are used on VM-Host affinity/anti-affinity rules in vCenter Server.

This is documented within the Cloud Director Workload Placement Engine documentation.