This week’s
tip is about deploying Red Hat 7 with Application Director (part of vRealize Automation)
I helped one
of my clients to deploy a RHEL7 VM through Application Director, he told me
that he looked everywhere and did not find anything about this issue and I
should post this solution that might help others on the same situation as he.
I
could not agree more with him.
The
environment where I was working on is composed of:
vCloud
Automation Center 6.1 (now vRealize Automation)
Application
Director 6.0 (now Application Services)
He told me
that the VM has been deployed successfully but communication with Application
Director to stage/configure the application never occurs, something related
with boostrap agent.
You will
also see something on the logs like this:
ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/vmware_appdirector_agent
start (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)
The issue
is related with the agent script not declaring the daemon which is required for
RHEL7 and CentOS7 to run.
Before we
dive into the solution, let’s see supportability statement:
As you can
see on vRA's support Matrix, RHEL7 is only supported on vRA 6.2.
Also on
Application Director’s 6.0 Manual RHEL is only supported up to 6.4 version.
Moving on,
despite of supported statement, provisioning a RHEL7 VM works on vCAC 6.1 without
any adjustment.
Let’s see
how we can make Application Director works with RHEL7 though.
- deploy
RHEL7 and configure it as you would normally do;
- install
boostrap agent (do not shutdown the VM yet);
- edit
vmware_appdirector_agent script (you can find it at /etc/init.d);
- add #!/bin/bash as the first line (before
the copyright information);
- run /opt/vmware-appdirector/agent-boostrap/agent_reset.sh
to clean any relic files;
- shutdown
the VM.
The VM is now ready to become your template.
As it’s not
supported by VMware I recommend you test it very well and use at your own risk
; )
