Aria Orchestrator workflow with "getAllVMs" action is taking longer time or returns 504 Gateway Timeout

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• Workflow to get VM list from vCenter endpoint with getAllVMs or getAllVirtualMachines action is taking longer time or returns 504 Gateway Timeout
• This runtime may be seen to increase from 8.18.1 patch 2 onward

Environment

VMware Aria Orchestrator 8.18.1, with patches 1-3

Cause

 The default cache expiration times were lowered as Orchestrator had many Java OOM Issues. 

Resolution

It is not recommended to get all VMs from vCenter in one go as this is not scalable and may have huge memory requirements.

To reduce the overall runtime, instead of requesting all VM's you can use an XPath expression to filter the results: Performance Considerations for Querying

An even faster method is to use the PropertyCollector, which the workflow "Get virtual machines by name" found in "Library > vCenter > Virtual Machine management > Basic" makes use of.

 

Possible Workarounds:

Increase the maximum requests per session with the property  - com.vmware.vmo.plugin.vi4.reqPerSession value to 200. 

1. Take Snapshot of Aria Orchestrator Nodes/ Valid Backup of Nodes. 
2. SSH to Aria Orchestrator appliance 
3. vracli vro properties set -k com.vmware.vmo.plugin.vi4.reqPerSession -v 200

It may be possible to alleviate the issue by increasing the memory allocated to Orchestrator.
For more info, see How to Scale the Heap Memory Size of the Automation Orchestrator Server