vCNS Inventory data collection fails when using an external vCO endpoint in vCAC 6.1

I recently installed vCAC 6.1, configured it to use an external vCO endpoint and disabled vCAC’s internal vCO instance. I noticed that when I did a data collection against vCNS it would fail with the error: Workflow ‘vSphereVCNSInventory’ failed with the following exception: Could not reach vCenter Orchestrator endpoint {0}. Trying the next highest priority endpoint.

Under Infrastructure > Monitoring > Log

Apparently vCAC’s internal vCO instance has the NSX plug-in installed, but for standalone vCO instances you have to install the NSX plug-in. You can get the plug-in for vCNS 5.5 here:

https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/info?slug=security_products/vmware_vcloud_networking_and_security/5_5

I’m using the following software versions:

vCAC 6.1
vCenter 5.5
vCNS 5.5.3

Once you install the NSX plug-in, you will see the following workflows in the vCO client:

Let’s run a data collection against vCO so vCAC knows about the new workflows:

As long as you set up the vCO endpoint correctly, it should succeed:

Now go into a Compute Resource where your vCNS Manager is registered to and run a data collection:

It may take a few minutes but you should see that it succeeds:

If it still fails, you may need to restart the VMware DEM-Worker – worker service on the IaaS machine.

Using the vCO client, you can see that running the data collection in vCAC caused the Create NSX endpoint to run. It will give the endpoint the name of your vCO endpoint in vCAC: