1.7 Troubleshooting vSphere VM Provisioning Actions

The following sections provide solution to the problems you might encounter while performing provisioning actions on VMs managed by the VMware vCenter hypervisor:

Unable to perform any provisioning adapter action after the Save Config action on the vSphere managed VM

Source: The PlateSpin Orchestrate Development Client.
Possible Cause: The VM UUID value of the vSphere managed VM is not a 128-bit hexadecimal value. Even though the Save Config action is successful and the VM is provisioned, the hypervisor automatically assigns a different UUID value. Subsequently, any provisioning adapter action performed on the VM fails.
Action: Specify a 128-bit hexadecimal value for the VM UUID.

  1. In the Orchestrate Development Client, click Resources > the vSphere managed VM.

    The Info/Groups tab is displayed by default.

  2. In the Virtual Machine Configuration panel, set the value of VM UUID to a 128-bit hexadecimal value.

  3. Right-click the vSphere managed VM, then click Save Config.

(503) Service Unavailable Errors Might Occur While Cloning vSphere VMs

Source: The PlateSpin Orchestrate Development Client..
Explanation: Running the Clone action repeatedly on vSphere VM templates might result in the following error: 
Clone : (503)Service Unavailable
Possible Cause: This error indicates that the server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. Testing has shown that this error is most likely to occur when vSphere and the PlateSpin Orchestrate Agent are both installed on the same Windows Server 2003 computer.
Action: If you encounter this error, we recommend that you download and apply the appropriate Microsoft hotfix to the vCenter server.

Invalid Datastore Path Error

Source: The source of the message.
Explanation: When attempting to Save Config a vSphere VM with an ISO-backed vDisk (for example, a vDisk that specifies a location in the /vmmimages folder and does not have its repository fact set), the job fails with a message similar to the following: 
VMSaveConfig : Invalid datastore path '/vmimages/tools-isoimages/linux.iso'
Action: To work around this issue, associate a policy with the ISO-backed vdisk object that prepends an empty datastore string ([]) to the beginning of the vdisk.location fact. For example: 
<policy>
  <vdisk>
    <fact name="location" 
          type="String" 
          value="[] /vmimages/tools-isoimages/linux.iso" />
  </vdisk>
</policy>