Failure to deploy VM using ISO to Workload Cluster in single domain environment from VCF Automation 9.x

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Deploying a virtual machine using an ISO to a Workload Cluster in a single domain environment from VCF Automation 9.x fails.
When observing the behavior, the following symptoms are present:

• In the VCF Automation UI, the VM incorrectly shows a status of "Ready".
  

• Reviewing the VCF Automation events reveals an "unknown" error for GuestCustomization and the message "updating state failed with update pending for persistent volume".
  

• On the associated vCenter Server, the following error is displayed: "Provided backing file is not accessible by Host".
  

Environment

VCF Automation 9.0.2

Cause

The issue occurs because a required tag is missing. Without this tag, the deployment is not correctly pointed to the specific workload clusters and their associated datastores, preventing the host from accessing the provided ISO backing file.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, configure the correct tags and storage policies to ensure the host can access the backing file:
    1. Log in to the vSphere Client.
    2. Create a new VM storage policy using a tag to explicitly select the datastore from the desired Workload Cluster.
    3. Add a new storage class backed by the newly created VM policy into the region.
    4. Modify the Content Library to use the new storage class. Note: This action will trigger a data copy between the datastores.
    5. Create a new vSphere namespace.
    6. Retry the VM deployment from the ISO to verify the issue is resolved.