Just Another IT Blog

It's time to share some of my experiences, crazy ideas, tips and tricks !!!

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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 ; )

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