My service provider customer has based their new platform on vRA 7.2. Yes 7.3 has been out for a while but due to the significant amount of development that has been done on this platform there has been resistance to perform point release upgrades in case any of the custom service development works stops functioning so close to being released for general consumption.

The problem with this approach is that you get left with the small issues that are fixed in the point releases which although seem minor at the time, become a real pain as time goes on. This is one of these such issues.

7.2 has a bug within it when it comes to custom xaas resource actions that are based off a VC:virtualmachine object. The resource actions get classified as “built-in” instead of “shared” which means that you lose the ability to assign custom icons to them. This might seem a small issue but in a branded portal that has custom icons for everything this is a big problem, particularly when you start multiplying the inconvenience by the number of tenants.

In my case the requirement is for many separate customers, each with their own tenant which means we get stuck with 40 odd resource actions in each tenant without icons.

In 7.2 the only fix available is to run a postgres update command which re-classifies the actions as “shared” but you are still left with the task of updating each resource action in each tenant.   The commands are detailed here:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2149050

Once you have done this though the icons stay unless you use something like codestream to continually push updates to actions as part of a Dev cycle. In this case every time you push the update you have to re-classify the action and potentially update the icon again. Very annoying!

Thankfully 7.3 fixes the issue so make sure you update to this version if you can, it will save loads of time!