Error: "Unable to perform this action. Contact your cloud administrator." when creating vApp templates using encoded Amazon S3 URLs.

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

• Template creation as per the steps in the documentation is failing with the error when using :

[ ########-####-####-####-############ ] Unable to perform this action. Contact your cloud administrator. 

• System administrators can see the following details from the UI stacktrace and task details:

[ ########-####-####-####-############ ] Catalog item file ########/########.vmdk?AWSAccessKeyId=########&Expires=########&Signature=######## is unreachable.

• Debug details from the failed task:

com.vmware.vcloud.api.presentation.service.InternalServerErrorException: Catalog item file ########/########.vmdk?AWSAccessKeyId=########&Expires=########&Signature=######## is unreachable.
        at com.vmware.vcloud.fabric.transfer.impl.ReceivingSocketImpl$FileImportResourceFuture.isDone(ReceivingSocketImpl.java:155)
        at com.vmware.vcloud.common.future.FutureUtil.waitForFutureOrCancel(FutureUtil.java:143)

• /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-debug.log show stacktrace of the following kind:

FutureUtil                     | Transfer session: ########-####-####-####-############, vApp/template: ############. Unable to retrieve OVF descriptor. | requestId=########-####-####-####-############,request=POST https://############/api/catalog/########-####-####-####-############/action/upload,...
com.vmware.vcloud.api.presentation.service.InternalServerErrorException: Catalog item file ########/########.vmdk?AWSAccessKeyId=########&Expires=########&Signature=######## is unreachable.
        at com.vmware.vcloud.fabric.transfer.impl.ReceivingSocketImpl$FileImportResourceFuture.isDone(ReceivingSocketImpl.java:155)
        at com.vmware.vcloud.common.future.FutureUtil.waitForFutureOrCancel(FutureUtil.java:143)

Environment

VMware Cloud Director 10.6

Cause

• The use-case to upload OVFs directly from S3 is not supported.
  
  • When S3 URLs are used for the VMDKs,VCD is considering the href as filePath and file paths can't have special characters.
  • URLs are not supported as VMDK file href.VCD's ovf validation will block uploading the files with exception because of this.

Resolution

Currently there is no resolution as this is an unsupported use case. 

Workaround(s):

1. Download the templates and use the local files to create the template. See documentation for the steps.
2. Use decoded URLs in place of encoded URLs. Refer KB 392989 in case you get the character length issue.