When attempting to update a deployment the vSphere machine is recreated instead of updated

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• doing a small change on a property like CPU or RAM triggers the vSphere machine recreation instead of an update
• the VM recreation may fail due to a mismatch between cloud template and deployment or even a different issue

Environment

Aria Automation 8.x

Cause

When certain properties on the deployment differentiate to the cloud template then the vSphere Machine is recreated instead being updated.

Resolution

This is a list of properties of the vSphere Virtual Machine object which can trigger the recreation when different to the cloud template:

• image
• imageRef
• customizationSpec
• folderName
• snapshotLimit
• constraints (Array and each property change is impacted)
• networks (Array and below properties are impacted)
  
  • assignPublicIpAddress
  • assignIPv6Address
  • assignment
• ovfProperties (Array not directly impacted, only properties below are impacted)
  • key
  • value
• cloudConfigSettings (not directly impacted, only properties below are impacted)
  • phoneHomeShouldWait
  • phoneHomeTimeoutSeconds
  • phoneHomeFailOnTimeout
  • deploymentFailOnCloudConfigRuntimeError

 

The property "network > assignment" can be removed from the cloud template if a static IP is assigned later during provisioning.