Unable to trigger pipelines on content management from Aria Suite Lifecycle.

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• Post patching Aria Suite Lifecycle to 8.18 Patch 7 it is observed that pipelines run from Aria Suite Lifecycle UI > Content Management > Pipelines > Run > The request is stuck in in-progress state and fails after sometime with timeout error.
• The blackstone-spring.log shows below logs
  java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/fasterxml/jackson/datatype/threetenbp/deser/ThreeTenDateTimeDeserializerBase
at java.base/java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.base/java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
at java.base/java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
at java.base/java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
at java.base/java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
at java.base/java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
at java.base/java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.base/java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
at java.base/java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
at org.springframework.boot.loader.LaunchedURLClassLoader.loadClass(LaunchedURLClassLoader.java:92)
at java.base/java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
at com.vmware.blackstone.common.ContentRepoUtils.getApiClient(ContentRepoUtils.java:309)
at com.vmware.blackstone.common.ContentRepoUtils.getContentLeaseControllerApi(ContentRepoUtils.java:333)

Environment

• Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18 Patch 7

Cause

• The issue is caused due to content ingestion failing to handle the datatypes of the content received. 
• This is caused due to incorrect version of Jackson datatypes dependencies being referenced by the Blackstone service.
• This was introduced when dependencies were updated in earlier releases during security bug fixes.

Resolution

• This issue is fixed in 8.18 Patch-8 and later releases of Aria Suite Lifecycle.
  
  
• Workaround:
  • Download the KB_437001.zip from the Attachments section of the article. 
  • Extract / Unzip and Copy the blackstone-external-8.18.0.jar file over to the /tmp directory of the Aria Suite Lifecycle.
  • SSH to the Aria Suite Lifecycle appliance using root credentials and navigate to the below directory: 
    cd /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone/spring-common/
  • Backup the current jar file:
    mv blackstone-external-8.18.0.jar blackstone-external-8.18.0.jar_backup
  • Replace the contents of the blackstone-external.jar:
    cp /tmp/blackstone-external-8.18.0.jar ./blackstone-external-8.18.0.jar
  • Ensure the file has the permissions of 770:
    chmod 770 ./blackstone-external-8.18.0.jar
  • Restart the service :
    systemctl restart blackstone-spring
  • Wait for 2 min for the services to initialize.
  • Validate the content endpoint.
  • Re-initiate the pipeline and monitor the status.