Thursday, December 19, 2013

vCAC Windows Deployment Stuck at CustomizeOS State

I ran into this issue in my lab recently.  I configured my Windows VM template with the vCAC guest agent (gugent) and then created a blueprint that used the agent to run a script on the deployed machine. 

The machine state would stop every time on "CustomizeOS" and eventually the deployment would time out.  From the Windows machine, I looked at the guest agent log and saw that it would hang every time on Wait for completion of '10_customizeos.bat' with no other progress.



The problem was that the scripts for the guest agent (located in the c:\VRMGuestAgent\site folder) were all "blocked" and could not be executed.  For example, looking at the properties of c:\VRMGuestAgent\site\CustomizeOS\10_customizeos.bat showed that ""This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer" - with the option to "Unblock"...



I noticed that the GugentZip_x64 that I downloaded from the vCAC 6.0 appliance was also blocked - this means that the content of the zip would also be blocked when unzipped!

To fix this (or prevent it), simply unblock the zip before extracting.  In my case, I took the extra precaution of removing the vCAC gugent service, deleting the entire c:\VRMGuestAgent and doing a fresh install with my "unblocked" zip.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Installing the Application Director 6.0 Bootstrap Agent on a Windows VM Template

In order to use a vCAC vSphere template with Application Director, you must install the Application Director agent on your VM. In this example, I have created a VM with Windows 2008 R2 that already has the vCAC guest agent installed. I will show how to add the Application Director agent and then prepare this for use with a linked clone vCAC vSphere blueprint, which can then be used for an Application Director OS template.

Friday, December 13, 2013

How to Modify or Disable Session Time Out for vCAC 6.0

The session time for the vCAC 6.0 console is set time timeout after 30 minutes.   Depending on your security needs, it may be helpful to decrease, increase or disable the session timeout.

You will need to modify a file on the vCAC 6.0 virtual appliance - DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK and please snapshot the VM or back up the file (or both, even better).  This is not an official VMware supported modification. 

The file you will need to edit:

/usr/lib/vcac/server/webapps/shell-ui-app/WEB-INF/web.xml

The section you will need to edit:

As you can see, the default value is in the session-timeout section and set at 30 minutes.  If you wish to disable the timeout altogether, just use -1 for the value there.

Restart your vCAC appliance to effect the change.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Hyperic 5.8 Released - vApp Upgrade Instructions

VMware released a minor upgrade for Hyperic yesterday - release notes are here.

Starting with the 5.0 release, VMware made a vApp version of Hyperic available.  If you have deployed a previous version of the Hyperic and want to upgrade I have already documented the steps in a previous post - see here - but you will need the 5.8 package of course.

Be sure to grab the hyperic-hqee-installer-x86-64-linux-5.8.0.tar.gz from VMware downloads - the screen cap below shows the exact listing in the file downloads area that you will need.


There's another file for Linux, the RPM, that won't work.

The complete upgrade process from the VAMI looks like this...