Saturday 13 January 2018

vRealize Automation 7.x Event Broker Subscription timeout

I have recently been working with a customer who want to use existing PXE boot mechanisms from within vRealize Automation to keep parity between physical and virtual deployments...

How this was engineered was using Event Broker Subscriptions to monitor for the Pre VMPSMasterWorkflow32.MachineProvisioned state, so vRA will create the vSphere VM and before marking the machine as 'provisioned', we execute a vRealize Orchestrator workflow to API call the build server, add the server to DNS, add to a CMDB, etc...

The issue that I faced was that the default timer on an EBS is 30 minutes; so I noticed that when this blocking subscription wasn't completing within 30 minutes, the event would fail and I'd see the below error:



"Error in state VMPSMasterWorkflow32.MachineProvisioned phase PRE event (queue=*****): Timed out waiting for Event Broker response"

On the actual Event Broker Subscription, there is a timeout setting which I had a more than 30 minutes, but the EBS was still failing after 30 minutes.  I modified the below setting, but the workflow was still not running beyond 30 minutes.



The answer was on the IaaS server in the C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\vCAC\Server\ManagerService.exe.config file.  In here, I had to modify the section <workflowTimeoutConfigurationSection>...





After restarting the vRA Manager Service, the workflows ran for more than the 30 minutes that they were previously timing out on.  Although customers want to provision VMs at the speed at which they can within AWS, and this is something vRA is perfectly capable of, an EBS workflow that takes more than 30 minutes is something that should be rare...  but a lot of the time, we meet customers business requirements which often include using existing systems and processes, so unfortunately, more than 30 minutes to provision a VM is not uncommon.


  

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