Deploying a vShield Edge: "The virtual machine is not supported on the target datastore"

Content as string: Failed to publish configuration on vShield Edge. Failed to deploy edge appliance.10105The virtual machine is not supported on the target datastore.vShield Edge

 

The API call was the second of two calls to deploy an Edge device into a vSphere Datacenter and Cluster, i.e. one Edge per datacenter, into a specified cluster.

The first Edge was deployed successfully, but not the second. Both clusters were configured in a very similar manner, the only real difference being the name of the datacenter they belonged to. Everything was hosted in a lab based solution using nested ESXi hosts.

My GoogleFu revealed not a lot more than this API reference doc and this description:

The virtual machine is not supported on the target datastore. This fault is thrown by provisioning operations when an attempt is made to create a virtual machine on an unsupported datastore (for example, creating a non-legacy virtual machine on a legacy datastore).

Much troubleshooting ensued before a resolution. Given that it was a lab all, of the ESXi hosts in both vSphere datacenters had access to the same datastores. While not typically a good idea for production, it had been an easy way for me to get the lab up and running. vSphere was quite happy for me to run things like this with VMs in both datacenters on the same datastores. vShield however, was not so happy and this turned out to be the reason it was failing to deploy with “The virtual machine is not supported on the target datastore”.

Reconfiguring the storage so that datastores were limited by datacenter then permitted successful Edge deployment in both sites.