Aria Automation displays incorrect or random IP address for multi-NIC virtual machines

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Aria Automation deployments with multi nic, the "address" filed is not the IpAddress of the first network interface.

In example below the ip of the first interface is: 192.168.10.180, but Address filed is using the IP address of the second interface: 10.1.0.6

Environment

Aria Automation 8.18.1 cumulative update 3

Cause

The primary IP address is a calculated property determined internally by VMware Aria Automation. Instead of simply selecting the first interface (eth0/nic0), the system evaluates all assigned IP addresses (IPv4, IPv6, Public, Private, Static, and Dynamic) and ranks them based on a specific internal precedence logic.

Aria Automation, by default prioritizes "Public" or non-standard address ranges over standard private ranges. The internal ranking typically follows this order (from lowest to highest priority):

10.x.x.x (Private Class A)

172.x.x.x (Private Class B)

192.168.x.x (Private Class C)

169.254.x.x (Link-local)

If a VM has multiple interfaces within the same range (e.g., two different 10.x.x.x addresses), the selection becomes random because the calculation only evaluates the first octet.

Resolution

Engineering is currently aware of this behavior and is working on a permanent fix. To receive updates on this issue, please subscribe to this knowledge article.

Workaround: 

To override this behavior you can set a property "primaryAddress" to true on the VM nic in the blueprint.

Any VMs that are provisioned in the future from this deployment will show the IP of the nic with this property as the IP of the VM

Example BP section for multi nic deployment

 Cloud_vSphere_Machine_1:
    type: Cloud.vSphere.Machine
    properties:
      networks:
        - network: ${resource.Cloud_vSphere_Network_1.id}
          assignment: static
          primaryAddress: true
        - network: ${resource.Cloud_vSphere_Network_2.id}
          assignment: static
        - network: ${resource.Cloud_vSphere_Network_3.id}
          assignment: static
          

Important:

The workaround is not working in current Aria Automation release 8.18.1 patch 3, Engineering is aware about this working on fix.

 

Additional Information

Reference documentation. 

Address value in General section of deployed cloud template.