External vRO 7.6 configuration gotcha

A while ago I needed to install an external vRO 7.6 appliance for a customer to their existing vRA 7.6 environment for an additional tenant. You would think this is a piece of cake, but I ran into an issue I had not yet seen myself. Also, looking around on the internet there was not a lot to be found on it.

The issue

This issue popped-up when trying to manage the vRO from vRA. The endpoint for this vRO was added successfully and the tenant was setup to use this vRO.

When trying to configure the Active Directory plug-in from vRA, I hit this error: Service workflow cannot be found

Investigation

I knew that in that past this wasn’t a problem so I checked the documentation to see if I missed anything. This is the specific part where the external vRO installation is described. At the bottom it states the following:

You configured the connection to the external vRealize Orchestrator server, and the vCAC workflows folder and the related utility actions are automatically imported. The vCAC > ASD workflows folder contains workflows for configuring endpoints and creating resource mappings.

Clearly this did not happen, since the service workflows cannot be found (according to the error).

I decided to compare the embedded and external vRO’s to see if there are any differences. And I noticed a lot of content missing on the external vRO. An example here:

This is just one package, but the list is longer.

Missing plug-ins:

o11nplugin-azure.dar
o11nplugin-data-management-1.0.0.dar
o11nplugin-gef-2.0.0.dar
o11nplugin-library.dar
o11nplugin-nsx-1.2.0.dar
o11nplugin-rp-provision-vcac-7.6.0-SNAPSHOT.dar
o11nplugin-rp-test-jenkins-7.6.0-SNAPSHOT.dar
o11nplugin-rp-tfs-7.6.0-SNAPSHOT.dar
o11nplugin-rp-vra-7.6.0-SNAPSHOT.dar
o11nplugin-vcac-devopsrpengine-7.6.0-SNAPSHOT.dar

Missing packages:

com.vmware.vra.adIntegration.package
com.vmware.vra.endpoint.azure.package
com.vmware.vra.xaas.package

The solution

Obviously what is stated in the documentation did not work in this scenario. I tested it in a lab and I got the same results. So, I decided to fix this by downloading the missing plug-ins and packages from the embedded vRO and install them on the external vRO.

This did the trick, after I uploaded it all I was able to configure the AD endpoint in vRA.

Conclusion

For some reason the functionality described in VMware’s documentation is not there anymore. I have flagged this internally and the documentation should get updated at some point. Just know there is some more manual work involved and there is no problem in doing so. After performing above steps everything works as it should.