VMware Aria Automation performance is slow or deployments fail due to corrupted vSphere tags

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

In VMware Aria Automation 8.18.1, you may experience extreme slowness in the user interface or encounter random failures during deployments. This issue is often characterized by:

• Intermittent deployment errors without a specific functional cause.
• Significant latency when navigating the Aria Automation portal.
• The presence of corrupted tags in vCenter Server containing garbled text or special characters (e.g., 8cfu...).

Environment

VMware Aria Automation 8.18.x

Cause

The performance impact is caused by malformed tags and tag categories within the integrated vCenter Server(s). These corrupted entries interfere with the collection and synchronization processes, leading to timeouts and deployment failures.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you must manually identify and remove the corrupted metadata from your vCenter environment:

1. Log in to each vCenter Server associated with your Aria Automation environment.
2. Navigate to Tags & Custom Attributes.
3. Search for tags containing garbled or non-alphanumeric characters (e.g., PK...).
4. Delete the tag if there are no objects associated with it.
5. Delete the tag category if the malformed tag was the only member of that category.
6. Repeat these steps for all connected vCenter instances.