While using VMware vCloud Automation Center Guest Agent or as many call it Gugent is not a mandatory requirements to use vCAC, it has its merits and use cases. In fact, many customers don’t end up deploying the vCAC Guest Agent within their Windows & Linux machines from day one, as not having the agent won’t stop vCAC from deploying a Windows or Linux VM and carry out the standard OS Customization. The interesting fact though, most of them end up installing it within their templates couple of months later, as they come up with a use case or two for it.

Let’s start by going over the vCAC Guest Agent use cases, and why should you install the Gugent within the templates you want to deploy with vCAC:

vCloud Automation Center Guest Agent Use Cases:

Note: If you are looking for how use Property Dictionary Relationship in vRA 7.0, then you want to look at my updated article at: vRA 7 Property Dictionary Relationship, though if you are looking for vRA 6.0, then please keep reading below.

While you can create property Dictionary Relationship XML by hand as I have shown in my previous post: vCAC 6 Property Dictionary Relationship, it has been proven to be so tedious of task to do when having a large environment,  that I wanted a more compelling way of doing it. That’s why I came up with my vCAC 6.x Property Dictionary Relationship Builder (This work with all versions of vCAC 5.1 and higher). I am going to continue with the example of my previous two posts: vCAC 6 Custom Properties – Build Profiles – Property Dictionary & vCAC 6 Property Dictionary Relationship and show you how to generate the same property dictionary relationship XML using my my Property Dictionary Relationship Builder. Please read my previous post for more background of the scenario used in this example.

Let’s start by quickly showing the same table used in my previous post to demonstrate the relationship we are trying to generate.… Read More

As I have deployed vCloud Automation Center 6.0.1 in my home lab on vSphere 5.5, the installation worked flawlessly as I have carried out the same installation several times in production for several customers before. vCAC seemed to work without any problem at all for few hours, then I started getting the following error every time I tried to access my vCAC Portal:

———————

Service Temporarily Unavailable 

The Server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

———————

Below is a screenshot of the actual error:

I was surprised to see the above error, and when checked the status of my vCAC Services under the services tab in the appliance management console of vCAC the pages was not loading although all the other tab were working just fine. I logged in through ssh to the vCAC Appliance and restarted the vCAC Service using the following command:

# service vcac-server restart

After restarting the vCAC Service and waiting for about 5 minutes, I have noticed that all the services of vCAC is now showing up on the service tab and right after that the vCAC portal started to function again. Initially I thought the service might hanged for some reason or so on, but after few hours the same issues came up, and I have noticed that I am getting the same problem repeatedly every few hours where my services stop again.… Read More

This problems seems to lately surface more than not when delivery a vCAC 6 Distributed installation. After you complete your vCloud Automation Center 6 installation without a hitch and you thought everything is working perfectly, you go to your Catalog Entitlements and try to assign Actions allowed and you notice that you have only few of what you really should have. The below screenshot provide a sample of which only actions I were able to entitle to my catalog items:

Before you jump to a conclusion that this the same problem you are having, please ensure that you have assigned the right permissions to your blueprint and entitlements to your Catalog item. For initial testing try to give all permissions to your blueprint as in the below screenshot:

After providing the permissions on the vCAC Blueprint then you want to ensure your Catalog entitlements are set correctly. Go to Catalog action entitlements and check which Actions could you entitle to your Catalog item. If it look like the below screenshot then you are definitely having the same problem this article is trying to address as you should have much more actions that you can entitle to your Catalog Items.

For some reason, it seems there is sometime a flick with the installation of the IaaS component, although no error get reported.… Read More

While delivering a distributed install of  vCloud Automation Center using exactly the same steps I have used for few previous engagements, & while the setup completed perfectly without any errors, accessing the infrastructure tab in vCAC has continuously reported the following error:

—————————————————————————-

Service Unreachable

A required service cannot be reached at the expected address.

Please contact your system Administrator for Assistance.

Reference error REPO404.

—————————————————————————–

I was quite certain I have done the certs right, as I followed my certs guide that I had followed in few other engagements previously and posted it on my blog before at: vCloud Automation Center 6 Certificates A to Z.  Just for your reference if you have not read that post all the certs was generated by Active Directory CA.

As the above error can be caused by few different causes, I have went into checking my different vCAC logs and the error that helped me identify the cause was in the vCAC IaaS Web Server Windows Event log and below is a copy of that error (I marked in red the part that gave it away)

——————————— vCAC 6 SSL/TLS secure channel Error Start ——————

Log Name:      Application

Source:        VMware GUI Administration

Date:          05/28/2014 5:36:52 PM

Event ID:      0

Task Category: None

Level:         Error

Keywords:      Classic

User:          N/A

Computer:      IAASWEB1.vt.com… Read More