After restoring VCF Automation from a backup, manually uploaded VCF Services fail to reconcile or find their OCI bundles/images

Products

• VCF Automation

Issue/Introduction

After performing a recovery of VCF Automation from a backup, one or more manually uploaded VCF Services (uploaded via Service Management / Partner Services) may exhibit the following symptoms. One or more of the symptoms below may be present — not all services will necessarily be affected, and some services may continue to operate normally immediately after the recovery while others fail:

- A manually uploaded VCF Service fails to reconcile or reconfigure after the recovery.
- A manually uploaded service that includes a Supervisor Service reports that it cannot locate its associated OCI bundle or container images.
- Certain manually uploaded services begin reporting failures at some point after the recovery, while others appear unaffected.
- Service health for one or more Partner Services shows as degraded or failed in VCF Automation following a backup restore.

Environment

VCF Automation 9.x

Cause

VCF Services that are manually uploaded (as opposed to services distributed by VCF) are supplied to VCF Automation as tarball packages. The content of these tarballs (including the OCI bundle and container images referenced by any Supervisor Service within the package) is not part of the standard VCF Automation backup set.

When VCF Automation is restored from a backup, the service metadata and configuration records for these manually uploaded services are restored, but the underlying tarball content uploaded prior to the backup is not. As a result, restored services can no longer locate the OCI bundles/images they depend on, which leads to reconciliation, reconfiguration, or health-reporting failures for those services.

Resolution

To restore full functionality of manually uploaded VCF Services after a VCF Automation recovery, re-upload the same tarball(s) that were uploaded prior to the backup:

1. Log in to VCF Automation.
2. Navigate to Service Management > Partner Services.
3. Select Upload VCF Service Tarballs.
4. Upload the tarball corresponding to each manually uploaded service that was in place prior to the backup.

When a tarball is uploaded, VCF Automation automatically detects whether a matching service already exists and associates the uploaded tarball with that existing service, restoring its health and reconciliation capability.

It is recommended to re-upload the tarballs for all manually uploaded services following a recovery, even if a given service is not yet reporting a failure — services that appear healthy immediately after recovery may fail later once reconciliation, reconfiguration, or an image pull is attempted.

Additional Information

- Retain copies of all manually uploaded VCF Service tarballs outside of VCF Automation (e.g., in your own artifact storage) so they are available for re-upload after any future recovery operation.
- This condition applies specifically to services uploaded manually through Partner Services; services obtained through the standard catalog flow are not affected in the same way.