Ansible Tower deployments failing in VCF Automation 9.0.

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

In VCF Automation 9.0.x, deployments with Ansible Tower objects may fail with various errors in the Automation UI.

Checking the logs, the below "Invalid hostVariables format" error is the cause of the failure.

/var/log/services-logs/prelude/terraform-service-app/file-logs/blueprint-provider-executor.log:

2026-01-01T12:00:00.000Z ERROR blueprint-provider-executor [host=terraform-service-app-#######-##### thread=pool-2-thread-31 user='######' org='' trace='' deployment='########-####-####-####-############'] c.v.t.p.a.t.service.AnsibleTowerService - Invalid hostVariables format. It needs to be in either of YAML or JSON format

 

Environment

VCF Automation 9.0.x

Cause

In the YAML code for the deployment, the Ansible Tower "hostVariables" section is missing a vertical-bar/pipe character "|".

E.g.

resources:
  My_Cloud_Ansible_Tower:
    type: Cloud.Ansible.Tower
    properties:
      ...
      hostVariables:
        port: 8000 
        name: ...

Resolution

Add a pipe character to the deployment YAML for the Cloud.Ansible.Tower resource in line: "hostVariables: |".

E.g.

resources:
  My_Cloud_Ansible_Tower:
    type: Cloud.Ansible.Tower
    properties:
      ...
      hostVariables: |
        port: 8000 
        name: ...