VCF Orchestrator MCP

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Troubleshooting ​

Missing Environment Variables ​

If the server exits with a missing variable error, set all required values:

bash
VCFA_HOST=...
VCFA_USERNAME=...
VCFA_ORGANIZATION=...
VCFA_PASSWORD=...

401 Unauthorized At Login ​

The session request sends Basic auth as {VCFA_USERNAME}@{VCFA_ORGANIZATION}. If credentials are correct but the login still returns 401:

  • VCFA_ORGANIZATION must be the organization name (the tenant URL slug, for example the <orgName> in https://<host>/tenant/<orgName>), not its display name.
  • Provider/system administrator accounts must set VCFA_ORGANIZATION=system. That routes the login to /cloudapi/1.0.0/sessions/provider; the tenant /sessions endpoint rejects provider accounts with 401 regardless of password.
  • The server auto-negotiates the VCF Cloud API version (9.1.0 on VCF Automation 9.1, 9.0.0 otherwise) via GET /api/versions. If negotiation misbehaves against an unusual target, pin it with VCFA_TARGET_PLATFORM=vcfa9.1 or vcfa9.0.

TLS Errors In Lab Environments ​

For lab systems with self-signed certificates, set:

bash
VCFA_IGNORE_TLS=true

Use this only when you accept the TLS risk.

Workflow Run Failures ​

Prefer run-workflow-and-wait with confirm: true during development after the target workflow and inputs are verified. It validates input names and types against get-workflow, waits for completion, and returns failure context when available.

If a workflow was started asynchronously, use:

  1. list-workflow-executions
  2. get-workflow-execution
  3. get-workflow-execution-logs

get-workflow-execution-logs reads the execution syslogs stream, which is where vRO exposes workflow token messages such as System.log, System.debug, System.warn, and System.error. Use level: "error" to show only error entries, or provide fileName to export the filtered logs as .json or .txt.

vRA/vRO 8 Mode ​

Set VCFA_TARGET_PLATFORM=vra8 for vRA/vRO 8.12+ Basic-auth mode. This mode supports vRO /vco/api read operations, workflow execution, and execution logs. Catalog, deployment, template, subscription, and event-topic tools require Automation-service token auth and return an unsupported-mode message in this phase.

Artifact Import Failures ​

Run the matching preflight tool first. Common issues include:

  • malformed ZIP archive
  • missing workflow-info or workflow-content
  • wrong workflow-content encoding
  • bad parameter or binding references
  • unsafe file name or path
  • package contents that include malformed nested artifacts

Catalog Or Template Ambiguity ​

Catalog items, templates, and deployments can be project-scoped. If a search returns no match or several plausible matches, inspect with get-catalog-item, get-template, or get-deployment before creating or updating anything.

GitHub Pages ​

After merging the docs workflow, set repository Pages source to GitHub Actions in GitHub repository settings. The workflow publishes the VitePress build output from docs/.vitepress/dist.