I was working on setting up a protection from an on-prem vCenter to a cloud site running VMware Cloud Director but whatever I did, I received an error message “Operation canceled due to an unexpected error”. From my point of view, an error is always unexpected, but I wanted to figure out what was going on.

The error in the GUI was too general but in the replicator log of the VMware Cloud Availability Replicator Appliance I saw this error:

2023-06-01 10:46:48.651 ERROR - [UI-8babdb5f-b844-4701-a350-6db8d8ce088a-r13165-1o-ux-7R] [https-jsse-nio-8043-exec-7] c.v.h.c.c.error.ExceptionAdvisorBase : A POST request from __system[<IP address>] to /inventory/2899b2c2-94dd-46a9-8738-11632cc384ce/vms/vm-by-name failed.

com.vmware.vlsi.client.exception.VlsiClientException: VC not found: 2899b2c2-94dd-46a9-8738-11632cc384ce

The vCenter was not found? Strange! So I checked the UUID of the vCenter server. SSH into the vCenter appliance with your favorite SSH tool, log in as root and run this command:

grep instanceUuid /etc/vmware-vpx/instance.cfg

Then I checked the UUID in the Cloud Director database. SSH to the primary node of Cloud Director and log in as root. The run these commands:

su - postgres
psql vcloud
select name, url, uuid from virtual_center;

The UUID from both commands was different so that was the reason for the VC not found error. How to solve it? Run this command on your cloud database after taking a backup:

update virtual_center set uuid = '<UUID from vCenter>' where uuid = '<Wrong UUID>';

Run this without the <>…

After changing the UUID in the vcloud database the error was gone and I could configure the protection.