vCloud Director: Creating a vApp fails with message “cannot update” and/or “failed to create”

Also read: vCloud Director – Failed to Create when trying to create a vApp (part 2)

When trying to create a brand new vApp in vCloud Director the task fails showing the error message “cannot update” and/or “failed to create”:

The vCloud Director GUI showed a message that the recompose of the vApp failed. The logs available in /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs showed the exact same message, but unfortunately no additional information.

While checking the various screens in vCloud Director, the following error showed up:

The Solution

There seems to be an error with Profile Driven Storage on which vCloud Director 5.1 is heavenly relying. Profile Driven Storage is a separate service on the vCenter Server. The service was not started in this environment. After starting the Profile Driven Storage service the problems disappeared, and there was no problem deploying new vApps.