Unable to create ServiceEngine after migrating to a new datacenter in the vcenter cloud

Products

• VMware Avi Load Balancer

Issue/Introduction

ServiceEngine creation will fail with the error "Target Host not found to create serviceengine Avi-se-xxxx".

Below event can be seen in the SE Events

  event_details {
    cc_se_vm_details {
      cc_id: "cloud-2d7d5533-xxx-xxx-xxx"
      se_vm_uuid: "Avi-se-xxxx"
      error_string: "Target Host not found to create serviceengine Avi-se-xxxx"
    }

Environment

All versions with vCenter Cloud

Cause

This error is generated when the cloud connector is unable to pick one of the available hosts in the datacenter configured in the cloud. The cloud connector tries to find a host with least resources used and validates its network capabilities, before assigning the host for the SE deployment.

During the validation, below error may be seen in the cc_agent_go_<cloud>.log

2025-09-18T20:38:50.182Z        ERROR   vcenterlib/vcenter_se_lifecycle.go:1139 [virtualcenter.xxxx] network dvportgroup-xxxx-cloud-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx not attached to host xxxx
2025-09-18T20:38:50.185Z        ERROR   vcenter/vcenter_placement.go:433        [Avi-se-xxxx] Target Host not found to create serviceengine Avi-se-xxxx

This suggests that the management portgroup that is required for the SE deployment is not attached to any of the hosts available in the new datacenter configured.

Resolution

Add the required management portgroup to the hosts in vCenter that will be used for the SE deployment. Make sure to apply the configuration change on vcenter for all the hosts that are applicable for the SEs as the ServiceEngineGroup could be configured with granular Host/Cluster scoping to include/exclude certain host/cluster. (Refer doc)