Ansible Automation Platform Fails to Connect to a new vm deployed by Aria Automation Due to Race Condition with vCenter Guest Customization

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

During Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning managed by the Aria Automation platform (integrated with vCenter and Ansible Automation Platform - AAP), the Ansible workflow triggers prematurely before the guest operating system (OS) is fully initialized and its network stack is ready to accept connections.

The core issue is a critical race condition where the Aria Automation extensibility event triggers the AAP job before vCenter Guest Customization has completed and the VM has rebooted/finished OS setup.

The primary symptom is a failed Ansible job resulting from connection errors (WinRM or SSH) to the newly provisioned VM, typically manifested as a connection attempt failing after multiple retries.

Environment

VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Cause

The issue is caused by a race condition between the Aria Automation extensibility trigger and the completion of the vCenter guest customization process.

The Ansible execution is likely triggered by a VM lifecycle event (compute.post.provision)  which signifies the VM's hardware is provisioned, but does not inherently wait for the guest OS within the VM to be fully ready (network up, services running, and OS customizations complete). Consequently, when Ansible attempts to connect via SSH or WinRM, the full network stack is not yet enabled on the guest OS, leading to connection failures. The failure is directly related to insufficient synchronization and wait timers between the platform components.

Resolution

As an immediate workaround, introduce a conservative delay within the Ansible Playbook itself.

• Introduce Wait/Pause Task: Add or adjust a lengthy pause or wait_for task at the beginning of the Ansible Playbook or Workflow template to conservatively delay execution until the VM is expected to be ready (e.g., waiting 5-10 minutes).

• Update Kerberos Configuration: The system administrator must immediately update the krb5.conf file on the Ansible Automation Platform server with the correct and current list of Domain Controllers. This eliminates the risk of an authentication failure (which can mask the successful completion of the timing fix) and ensures the WinRM/SSH authentication pathway is robust.