Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
So I have been getting a lot of questions regarding the vCAC 5.2 Guest Agents. In vCAC 5.2 the guest agents have changed and there are a few bugs in the Windows Installation. Good new for those of you who had upgraded from vCAC 5.1, you don’t need to scramble to move form the 5.1 guest agent, to the vCAC 5.2 guest agent. The vCAC 5.1 guest agent will still work as usual as long as you had it configured for SSL. The big driver for the change to the Windows agent is Windows Server 2012. The previous vCAC 5.1 agent will not work with Windows Server 2012 so if you are planning on using 2012, you will need to use the 5.2 guest agent.
Installing the vCAC 5.2 Windows Agent
You have two options for using the vCAC guest agent. You can pre-install the agent in your templates, or if you want to keep your templates clean you can install the agent as part of the Sysprep customization by using customization specifications. For information on auto deploying the guest agent see the following post:
http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/vcloud-automation-center-vcac-5-1-automated-install-of-windows-guest-agent/
This post focuses on the vCAC 5.1 guest agent, but with the information you find in this post you should be able to apply the same concept to script the installation of the 5.2 agent into windows.
Installing the vCAC 5.2 Guest agent into a Windows Guest Template
- Copy the GugentZIP.Zip file to your template Virtual Machine and extract the ZIP file to your C: drive. You should end up with C:\VRMGuestAgent. Under this folder you will have all the files and subfolders associated with the Guest Agent.
- Next we need to install the agent service on the windows machine. We do this by running the following command C:\VRMGuestAgent\winservice -i -h {FQDNofvCAC}:443 -p ssl.
- Once you have installed the service you will need to make an edit to the InstallSoftware.js. The InstallSoftware.js file is the script that handles executing scripts within the guest VM. There is a currently a “typo” in the InstallSoftware.js file that reads; “var p = this.shell.Exec(cmd);” you need to change this to “var p = this.shell.Run(cmd);“
That’s it. To use the agent simply follow the directions for executing scripts using the guest in the following post, minus the installation of course. Using the agent starts at Step 9.
http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/vcloud-automation-center-vcac-5-1-executing-scripts-with-the-windows-guest-agent/