VRA remove waiting on retry status

From time to time you’ll see machines in vRA that have the status “On (Reconfigure failed, waiting to retry)”. In some cases this status will never go away, because in reality the retry is already done and everything went well but the status in vRA still says “Waiting for retry”.

The problem with a “Waiting on retry” status is that you cannot edit the machine properties, as vRA thinks that the machine is still waiting for other changes to be applied.

In vRealize Automation there is no option to reset the status of a machine. The only solution to reset the machines status to “On” again, is to edit the database of vRA. You would think that editing the database is the worst option to get a status back to normal, but it is actually recommended by VMware in some cases (see https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2114385 and https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2141917?lang=en_US).

So we login to the vRA database server (in this case a MSSQL server) and select the vRA database. As you can see in the table view, there are many different tables containing everything that vRA is made of.

The table that contains the machines and its status is “dbo.Virtualmachine”. You can check the contents of this table by starting a new query like select * from [dbo].[virtualmachine]

To check what the current state of a machine is, you can query select CurrentTask from [dbo].[virtualmachine] where VirtualMachineName in ('VM_name').

Now as we want to reset this status to the default, we have to reset the CurrentTask field to nothing. To do this we execute the following SQL statement: update [dbo].[virtualmachine] set CurrentTask = NULL where VirtualMachineName in ('VM_name ').

When we run the previous query (select from) again, we can check the new status of the current task. And when we check in vRA we will see that the status is back to “On” and we can make modifications to the machine again.

Daniël de Zoete

Started his working life as a system manager at a health care organization. Is now a dedicated technical consultant at PepperByte. Specialist in virtualization and security.

Core qualities
Eager to learn, punctual, fun, loyal, patient

Hobbies
Socializing, watching television series and sports

Job description
Technical Consultant