Recently i installed the new vCAC 6.1 in my lab, vCAC 6.1 has many improvements, if you’d like to learn more about the improvements you can read Omer Kushmaro’s (Twitter @elastic_Skies) excellent blog post or just read the VMware blog post here. During my installation i found that the deployment process for the Application services component of vCAC (AKA Application Director) has changed, it is more integrated with vCAC now and there are a few things you need to know when setting it up so it will work well for you. here is a short guide:
1. First create a DNS record for the appliance in DNS as it won’t register itself on it’s own.
2. Deploy the OVF, this is very straight forward and you need to just follow the wizard.
3. The next step is to open the console of the VM and enter a license number:
vCAC AppD 6.1 installation screenshots – add license
4. Enter a password for the root account and the Darwin account (don’t mind the warnings in my screenshot as I use simple passwords in my lab)
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – Enter Password
5. The appliance will run through configuration and will start the services
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – Starting Services
6. Now it should ask you whether you want to use this for a migration from 6.0.1, click No since this is a new install.
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – New Install?
7. It will now need to register with the vCAC instance, for this it asks for a URL of the vCAC instance and a user and password. The URL format should be similar to this https://vcac.lab and the user name is usually administrator@vsphere.local, This is not the cloud provider creation, vCAC cloud provider will need to be done as well.
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – First Registration with vCAC
8. If it succeeds registering with the vCAC appliance it will ask you if you want to setup out of the box content. Of course I do!, NOTE- this is VERY important – the sample content is added into the vCAC tenant, it will ask you in the next steps to type the tenant and the admin user, you need to make sure that the user you will input has the application services roles in vCAC for it to succeed. For that log in to the vCAC instance using the tenant administrator or the application administrator you want to use and go to administration/Groups and edit the group used for administration (in my lab there is only one group but in a production environment there might be multiple administration groups)
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots -Adding Application Roles in vCAC
9. After you made sure this is done hit Y and “Enter”
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – Setting OOB Sample content
10. This is one of the nices enhance,ments in this version, it supports multi-tenant environment that aligns with vCAC tenants, to add the sample content to the right tenant you need to enter the tenant’s name and the user you added the roles to in the previous step and the business group you wish to add content to.
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – Integrating with Tenant
11. At this point it should state that the import was successful
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – Out of the box Sample Content success
12. Next step is to set the Application services admin account
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – Enter Admin Password
13. Now let’s configure the Appliance with the right IP/ hosts file and date. Login again using root and run “vi /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0” to edit the file
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots -Setting Appliance IP
14. Make sure it looks something similar to the screenshot below and hit “ESC” and then “ :x” and “Enter” to save and exit
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – Setting IP 2
15. Restart the network service by typing “service network restart”
16. To change the hostname permanently edit the file /etc/HOSTNAME using vi like in step 13 and input the hostname and save the file
17. Run the command “hostname <your fqdn>” and hit enter to set the hostname without a restart
18. You need to also set the hostname in the hosts file, edit the hosts file by running “vi /etc/hosts” and add a line for your hostname and ip as follows (example): “ 192.168.1.1 vcac-appd.fqdn.com vcac-appd” save and exit VI as explained in step 13.
19. We need also to configure NTP and time zone for time synchronization , for that edit /etc/ntpd and change the server entry to your ntp server and save the file
20. Run “service ntp restart” to restart the NTP service
21. For time zone I run “yast timezone” and configure time zone
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots -Configure Time Zone using Yast
22. To check that time is synced correctly run the command “date”.
23. Last we need to configure or make sure that DNS is configured correctly, (it can take it from DGCP but if no DHCP exist or if it is different DNS) edit “/etc/resolv.conf” and make sure this is the DNS you need
24. Reboot the appliance
25. After the reboot login to the new Application Services web interface to the tenant with the tenant administrator user, URL should be https://<Appd fqdn>:8443/Darwin/org/<tenant name>
26. You should see the sample applications populated
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – Sample Content
27. Register with a cloud provider that could be vCD, vCAC or EC2, in my lab I registered it with vCAC. Click on the cloud icon at the top right and then on “cloud providers”
28. here input the details of the vCAC instance, notice that the business group will populate with the bushiness group you provided at the beginning, this is great because we don’t have to have the “Default” business group like we had to in the previous version that was kinda limiting.
vCAC AppD 6.1 Installation Screenshots – New Cloud Provider
One note that I got from Kris Thieler (Twitter @inkysea) who is an esteemed member of my team at the Cloud management SET team which is very important
“When adding the OOTB content to a business group. If the business group has white space in the name: example. Cloud Developers. Then you must enclose the business group in quotes. example: “Cloud Developers”
Kris’s blog is here
That’s it for this article, i will post another one for further configuration of vCAC and Application Services or if someone else had done it will direct you to that article. In any case i hope this will be helpful to some.
Niran
