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.



IF YOU HAVE ALREADY installed the vCAC guest agent (gugent) then you will need to uninstall the guest agent as a service (stop the service and then run sc delete VCACGuestAgentService).  The Application Director agent bootstrap install will configure the vCAC agent as part of the installation process.  

Obtain the vCAC guest agent install and unzip it to the c:\VRMGuestAgent folder but do not install the agent as you normally would.  The Application Director agent bootstrap install will do this for you.

First, you will need to install JRE 1.7, which is available on the Application Director appliance at  


http://ip of your appliance/agent/jre-1.7.0_45-win64.zip

If you are interested, this file can be found in the path /home/darwin/tcserver/darwin/webapps/darwin/agent on the appliance (as well as all the other agent files).


I simply used IE to grab the file.  

Create a directory c:\opt\vmware-jre and unzip the contents of the download to that folder - make sure that the extracted data lands in the folder c:\opt\vmware-jre\ and NOT in
c:\opt\vmware-jre\jre-1.7.0_45-win64 because the boot agent script expects java to be in either c:\opt\vmware-jre\bin or in the system path (adding your java install path to the system path is a good idea, but not required if you adhere to the expected path of c:\opt\vmware-jre

Once extracted, you can validate that JRE is working by running c:\opt\vmware-jre\bin\java -version 

 Now download the agent install from the appliance http://ipofyourappliance/agent/vmware-appdirector-agent-bootstrap-windows_6.0.0.0.zip

Extract the agent files to your c:\windows\temp folder.  You will need to disable security on the agent_bootstrap.ps1 file by right clicking the file, selecting properties from the context menu and then clicking "Unblock" and then "OK"

Now, for the next step you have a couple of choices in how to proceed.  The agent bootstrap service needs to run as the local "darwin" user account (this is created by the install.bat - you don't need to create it).

The install.bat will actually take care of this for you, but you will need the NTRights.exe utility from Microsoft, which is included in the Windows Server 2003 Resource kit.  Simply download the resource kit, install it and then place the NTRights.exe file in the same folder as the agent bootstrap install files.  The install.bat will take care of the rest.


Otherwise, you can skip the NTRights utility and the install file will simply instruct you to perform this task manually.  This is what I elected to do for my install example.

In either case, you are now ready to perform the agent bootstrap install.  From the install directory, I use the following command:

install.bat password=VMware1! cloudProvider=vcac vcacServer=iaas.mylab.dias httpsMode=true

NOTES!

The password value is used to set the password for the local "darwin" account which will be created to run the agent bootstrap service.

The cloudProvider should be set to vcac.

The vcacServer value is the FQDN for the Windows server running the vCAC 6.0 IaaS model manager.

Here's my output after running the agent bootstrap install - note that I am instructed to set the service logon manually because I elected to not install or use NTRights.exe:


Look for ntrights.exe...
Attempting to use C:\opt\vmware-appdirector\agent-bootstrap\ntrights.exe for gra
nting darwin user the privileges to run the bootstrap service.
ERROR: C:\opt\vmware-appdirector\agent-bootstrap\ntrights.exe not found.

Please perform the following manual steps to complete the bootstrap installation
 process.
- Run services.msc to bring up the Services management console.
- Open "VMware vCloud Application Director agent bootstrap service"
- In the Log On tab, select "This account" for "Log on as",
  enter ".\darwin" as the account name and enter its respective password.
- Click OK.


Agent bootstrap installation partially completed. Please follow up with the manu
al steps to complete the installation.
You will find that the install.bat created a new folder under c:\opt for the bootstrap agent. Installation log output can be viewed there if you need to troubleshoot.

Open services.msc and adjust the log on settings for the VMware vCloud Application Director agent bootstrap service to use the "./darwin" account and set the password to the value used in the install.bat parameters.

At this point you can shut down the guest OS on your VM and after the VM is powered off, I will make a snapshot to use with my vCAC blueprint specifically for Application Director OS templates.