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Quick Tip - vSphere with Tanzu fails to sync Content Library with 500 Internal Server Error

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While setting up a new vSphere with Tanzu environment (which can run with just 32GB of memory), I ran into a really strange issue where my vSphere Content Library templates were not being picked up by the VM Service. I was going insane as I have configured this a number of times and I have never ran into this particulare issue before. I thought maybe it was a configuration problem but the enablement of vSphere with Tanzu was 100% successful and everything was showing green.

While looking at the vmware-system-vmop-controller-manager container log, I noticed that the VM Service can see the template but it just fails to extract and process it and throws a 500 Internal Server Error message:

E0917 12:08:23.060929 1 content_library_provider.go:275] vsphere/contentlibrary "msg"="error extracting the OVF envelope from the library item" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "contentLibraryUUID"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6" "itemName"="ubuntu-22.04-custom-image"
E0917 12:08:23.060984 1 content_library_provider.go:275] vsphere/contentlibrary "msg"="error extracting the OVF envelope from the library item" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "contentLibraryUUID"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3" "itemName"="photon-ova"
E0917 12:08:23.060998 1 contentsource_controller.go:203] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="failed to get VirtualMachineImage from content library" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "clProviderName"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6" "clProviderUUID"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6"
E0917 12:08:23.061011 1 contentsource_controller.go:203] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="failed to get VirtualMachineImage from content library" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "clProviderName"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3" "clProviderUUID"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3"
E0917 12:08:23.061032 1 contentsource_controller.go:401] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="Error in syncing image from the content provider" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3"
E0917 12:08:23.061079 1 controller.go:317] controller/contentsource "msg"="Reconciler error" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3" "namespace"="" "reconciler group"="vmoperator.vmware.com" "reconciler kind"="ContentSource"
E0917 12:08:23.061123 1 contentsource_controller.go:401] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="Error in syncing image from the content provider" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6"
E0917 12:08:23.061165 1 controller.go:317] controller/contentsource "msg"="Reconciler error" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6" "namespace"="" "reconciler group"="vmoperator.vmware.com" "reconciler kind"="ContentSource"

I was running out of ideas and things to try and I decided to look at the content library configuration to see if I had missed something.

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vSphere Event-Driven Automation using Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service

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Right before the holiday, I had spent some time exploring Tanzu Application Platform (TAP), which also recently GA'ed. TAP provides developers with an application-aware platform that focuses on making the developer experience easy for developing, building and running applications on Kubernetes.


If you are interested in a quick technical deep dive into TAP, check out this video by Scott Sisil, introducing TAP:

One of the core components of TAP is the Cloud Native Runtime (CNR), which is VMware's commercial offering of the popular open source project Knative. The VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project also makes use of Knative as our backend to provide customers with an event-driven automation solution.

Early on in the VEBA project, we knew that we wanted to develop and innovate with the community in the open but we also understood there would be users who would want an officially supported offering that they can call or file support requests when needed. Early last year, Michael Gasch, the lead architect for VEBA started to port the code from the VMware Event Router, which is the heart of VEBA into CNR's Tanzu Sources for vSphere and start unifying the two code bases. The goal is to ensure that users of the open source project VEBA will also have a consistent user experience in terms of function deployment when using the commercial offering.

As shared back in Dec, I was able to successfully deploy TAP, CNR and Sources for vSphere all running on our Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service which includes both our on-premises offering called vSphere with Tanzu and our managed service offering called VMware Cloud with Tanzu services. For those interested, you can find the instructions below on how to deploy and configure TAP to enable vSphere event-driven automation capabilities for your infrastructure.

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Quick deep dive into vSphere Namespace roles

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Before you can start consuming a vSphere with Tanzu enabled vSphere Cluster, you need to first create and configure a vSphere Namespace. This is a pretty straight forward process (check out this quick video if you are interested). One of the required configuration is to setup up permissions for which user/groups can access and consume the vSphere Namespace using one of the three default roles.


A question was recently raised in the community on the definition of each role since the user was not able to find more details in the official documentation. Here is a quick summary for each role and its functionality:

  • Owner - Can modify and delete vSphere Namespace
  • Can Edit - Can modify vSphere Namespace
  • Can View - Can perform read only operations on vSphere Namespace

Note: I have already shared this feedback with the vSphere with Tanzu Product Manager to help improve our documentation on this topic

There was also a related question on whether these roles mapped into Kubernetes (K8s) layer, which is the Supervisor Cluster in your vSphere with Tanzu enabled vSphere Cluster? This actually got me curious since I am still a novice when it comes to K8s access control (RBAC). I decided to take a closer look and with some trial error, I was able to see how these vSphere Namespace roles, which is a vCenter Server construct maps into the respective K8s constructs within the Supervisor Cluster.

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