Parameters in bosh runtime config interferes with tkgi create-cluster command

Products

• VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition

Issue/Introduction

Customer saw this error when executing the tkgi create-cluster command:

Failed to create or update cluster: cluster01.<domain>. Last action state: failed. Last action description: Instance provisioning failed: There was a problem completing your request. Please contact your operations team providing the following information: service: p.pks, service-instance-guid: ########-####-####-####-############, broker-request-id: ########-####-####-####-############, task-id: 40, operation: create, error-message: Property 'deployments' value (nil) did not match the required type 'Array'.

 

In the broker logs for TKGi on the pivotal-container-service VM (/var/vcap/sys/log/broker/broker.stdout.log) we saw this error line:

{"timestamp":"1757009916.982778072","source":"od-broker","message":"od-broker.lastOperation.starting-check-for-operation","log_level":1,"data":{"correlation-id":"########-####-####-####-############","instance-id":"########-####-####-####-############","session":"26"}}
[od-broker] [########-####-####-####-############] 2025/09/04 18:18:37.016783 BOSH task ID 42 status: error create deployment for instance ########-####-####-####-############: Description: create deployment Result: Property 'deployments' value (nil) did not match the required type 'Array'

 

To get more detail, we executed bosh task <task_number_of_tkgi_command> --debug and saw the deployments=>nil in a section related to Runtime configs:

D, [2025-09-05T20:13:43.925162 #215062] [task:560] DEBUG -- DirectorJobRunner: Runtime configs:
{"releases"=>[{"name"=>"system-metrics", "version"=>"3.0.13"}, ... {"include"=>{"deployments"=>nil}, 

This indicates that the errors following were due to something found in the runtime config.

Cause

The attribute "deployments" was set in a bosh runtime-config. The attribute was incorrectly set to a null value as part of a bosh add-on configuration.

Resolution

To fix the error, you must inspect the runtime configs and find the one which sets the offending attribute. Follow this procedure to update the runtime config with correct syntax (in this example, setting a valid value for the deployments attribute), then retry the failing tkgi command.