Supervisor Cluster Registration Fails in TMC-Self Managed 1.4.1 Due to Missing Agent Image Paths

Products

• VMware Tanzu Mission Control - SM

Issue/Introduction

A Supervisor cluster registration in TMC-Self Managed 1.4.1 failed with an internal server error in the TMC UI during the initial registration process. The failure occurred during the generation of the management cluster registration manifest. Logs from the cluster-agent-service-server reported NOT_FOUND errors for required agent images such as the bootstrapper. This blocked the registration process and prevented onboarding of Supervisor clusters, which is required for lifecycle management, policy enforcement, and cluster visibility via TMC.

The issue was verified by examining the cluster-agent-service-server logs, which included errors of the form:

was not fetched: could not load image source: GET …: NOT_FOUND: repository … not found

On the Supervisor side, the tmc-bootstrapper job also failed with the message:

update management cluster to backend: failed to generate registration manifest

Environment

VMware Tanzu Mission Control - SM

Cause

TMC-Self Managed 1.4.1 referenced agent image paths that did not exist in the internal Harbor registry, even though the images were mirrored using imgpkg. The paths requested matched the expected image structure but were not found.

The issue is likely caused by improper extraction of the TMC bundle on a system where the Linux shell shares a filesystem with Windows. This may result in incorrect file naming formats under the agent-images directory.

For example, the expected format is:

manifest:<TAG>.tar

However, on affected systems, the file may be extracted with an incorrect format that does not match the registry path used by TMC, causing NOT_FOUND errors during image fetch attempts.

Resolution

To resolve the issue, either of the following actions can be taken:

Option 1 – Manual Workaround (Re-tagging Images):

1. Review the image path reported in the cluster-agent-service-server log.
2. Locate the image file under the agent-images/ directory on the bootstrap host.
3. Re-tag the image to exactly match the full path shown in the error message.
4. Push the re-tagged image to the Harbor registry at the expected location.

Option 2 – Upgrade Fix:

Upgrade TMC-Self Managed to version 1.4.2, which introduces an updated installation method that eliminates the need for manual image re-tagging and avoids this issue altogether.

Manually re-tagging the images using the exact path seen in the error logs allows the registration to proceed. Upgrading to TMC 1.4.2 permanently resolved the problem by avoiding reliance on manual image handling, providing a more robust and error-resilient installation experience.