I was chatting with my colleague Paudie O’Riordan yesterday about PowerVCF as he was doing some testing internally and he mentioned that a great addition would be to have the ability to find, and cleanup failed tasks in SDDC Manager. Some use cases for this would be, cleaning up an environment before handing it off to a customer, or before recording a demo etc.

Currently there isnt a supported public API to delete a failed task so you have to run a curl command on SDDC Manager with the task ID. So getting a list of failed tasks and then running a command to delete each one can take time. See Martin Gustafson’s post on how to do it manually here.

I took a look at our existing code for retrieving tasks (and discovered a bug in the logic that is now fixed in PowerVCF 2.1.5!) and we have the ability to specify -status. So requesting a list of tasks with -status “failed” returns a list. So i put the script below together to retrieve a list of failed tasks, loop through them and delete them. The script requires the following inputs

• SDDC Manager FQDN. This is the target that is queried for failed tasks
• SDDC Manager API User. This is the user that is used to query for failed tasks. Must have the SDDC Manager ADMIN role
• Password for the above user
• Password for the SDDC Manager appliance vcf user. This is used to run the task deletion. This is not tracked in the credentials DB so we need to pass it.

Once the above variables are populated the script does the following:

• Checks for PowerVCF (minimum version 2.1.5) and installs if not present
• Requests an API token from SDDC Manager
• Queries SDDC Manager for the management domain vCenter Server details
• Uses the management domain vCenter Server details to retrieve the SDDC Manager VM name
• Queries SDDC Manager for a list of tasks in a failed state
• Loops through the list of failed tasks and deletes them from SDDC Manager
• Verifies the task is no longer present

Here is the script. It is also published here if you would like to enhance it

# Script to cleanup failed tasks in SDDC Manager
# Written by Brian O'Connell - Staff Solutions Architect @ VMware

#User Variables
# SDDC Manager FQDN. This is the target that is queried for failed tasks
$sddcManagerFQDN = "lax-vcf01.lax.rainpole.io"
# SDDC Manager API User. This is the user that is used to query for failed tasks. Must have the SDDC Manager ADMIN role
$sddcManagerAPIUser = "administrator@vsphere.local"
$sddcManagerAPIPassword = "VMw@re1!"
# Password for the SDDC Manager appliance vcf user. This is used to run the task deletion
$sddcManagerVCFPassword = "VMw@re1!"



# DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE
#########################################

# Set TLS to 1.2 to avoid certificate mismatch errors
[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12

# Install PowerVCF if not already installed
if (!(Get-InstalledModule -name PowerVCF -MinimumVersion 2.1.5 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)) {
    Install-Module -Name PowerVCF -MinimumVersion 2.1.5 -Force
}

# Request a VCF Token using PowerVCF
Request-VCFToken -fqdn $sddcManagerFQDN -username $sddcManagerAPIUser -password $sddcManagerAPIPassword

# Disconnect all connected vCenters to ensure only the desired vCenter is available
if ($defaultviservers) {
    $server = $defaultviservers.Name
    foreach ($server in $defaultviservers) {            
        Disconnect-VIServer -Server $server -Confirm:$False
    }
}

# Retrieve the Management Domain vCenter Server FQDN
$vcenterFQDN = ((Get-VCFWorkloadDomain | where-object {$_.type -eq "MANAGEMENT"}).vcenters.fqdn)
$vcenterUser = (Get-VCFCredential -resourceType "PSC").username
$vcenterPassword = (Get-VCFCredential -resourceType "PSC").password

# Retrieve SDDC Manager VM Name
if ($vcenterFQDN) {
    Write-Output "Getting SDDC Manager Manager VM Name"
    Connect-VIServer -server $vcenterFQDN -user $vcenterUser -password $vcenterPassword | Out-Null
    $sddcmVMName = ((Get-VM * | Where-Object {$_.Guest.Hostname -eq $sddcManagerFQDN}).Name)              
}

# Retrieve a list of failed tasks
$failedTaskIDs = @()
$ids = (Get-VCFTask -status "Failed").id
Foreach ($id in $ids) {
    $failedTaskIDs += ,$id
}
# Cleanup the failed tasks
Foreach ($taskID in $failedTaskIDs) {
    $scriptCommand = "curl -X DELETE 127.0.0.1/tasks/registrations/$taskID"
    Write-Output "Deleting Failed Task ID $taskID"
    $output = Invoke-VMScript -ScriptText $scriptCommand -vm $sddcmVMName -GuestUser "vcf" -GuestPassword $sddcManagerVCFPassword

# Verify the task was deleted    
    Try {
    $verifyTaskDeleted = (Get-VCFTask -id $taskID)
    if ($verifyTaskDeleted -eq "Task ID Not Found") {
        Write-Output "Task ID $taskID Deleted Successfully"
    }
}
    catch {
        Write-Error "Something went wrong. Please check your SDDC Manager state"
    }
}
Disconnect-VIServer -server $vcenterFQDN -Confirm:$False

As always, comments/feedback welcome!