vCloud Director 1.5.1 not showing Blocking Tasks

I have been doing some testing lately with vCloud Director 1.5.1 & working with blocking tasks was one of them. I have configured blocking tasks for “Instantiate vApp from Template”, so the task of deploying a vApp will be blocked and I get to approve it before continuing as shown in the below screen shot.

VMware vCloud Director blocking tasks

Although when ever I tested to deploy a vAPP the vAPP deployment was blocked and give a “pending processing” status as expected and showing in the screen shot below, I could not see the task anywhere under my blocking tasks.

VMware vCD Blocking vApp pending processing

Below is a screen shot of my blocking tasks which is oddly did not show up any pending tasks, although I am sure I had one in there as you can see from the above screenshot.

vCloud Director blocking taks no pending processing

This is was kinda shocking to me at first, as I knew this was showing earlier in vCloud Director 1.5 at my home lab. After communicating to few colleagues in VMware, I have discovered that vCloud Director 1.5.1 is having this kinda of behavior when initiating the task as a system admin user. Its important to note though that it work just fine if you initiate your actions as an Org admin or user. What this means in the scenario above is that if I am in the system admin portal and deploy a vAPP my blocking tasks tab will not show any blocking tasks. On the other hand, if I login to any Organization within my vCloud Director as an Org user/admin and deploy a vAPP that is getting registered correctly in my blocking tasks. This is seems to be like a small bug with vCloud Director 1.5.1 and does not seems to me as the intended behavior and will probably be fixed with the next update. On the other hand, its good to keep this in mind as blocking tasks initiated by the vCloud Director System Admin will stuck in the pending state till their time out expire without any way to cancel it in the GUI, though you still can cancel it through API calls or wait for the timeout to expire and the task will execute the default action setup under settings in your Blocking Tasks section.

Hope this help explain this vCD Blocking Tasks behavior to other folks hitting the same frustration, & help others avoid having too many pending tasks without being able to cancel it but by using API calls.

Comments

  1. Brilliant – thank you. I was wondering the exact same thing on my home lab. I enabled blocking tasks for media renaming, and like you, it was pending, but no tasks were appearing. This explains a lot.

  2. Hi Kamal,

    Great to know that my post was helpful.
    Thanks,
    Eiad

  3. One question – how did you get rid of the task if it stays in the “pending” state?

  4. Ah, nevermind. The timeout setting wasn’t working at all, so I edited the vcloud DB directly – set the job to the “failed status” (5 is pending, 3 is failed I believe) and removed any mention of the failed job from the catalog tables.

  5. Hi Kamal,

    Sorry for the bit late reply, but usually these will expire in 5 days and abort by default depending on your setting. Else you could have stopped it using the API.

    Enjoy,
    Eiad

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