Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

In this article we are going to cover how to install the vCAC 6.0.x Linux Guest Operations Agent. The Linux Guest Operations agent is used to perform post provisioning tasks inside the Linux Guest Operating system as part of the vCAC provisioning process. The Linux guest agent runs after the vSphere Customization Specifications runs to perform additional configuration tasks against the machine. There are three common built in features of the guest agent that are commonly used. THose are:

1. Partition, Format, & Mount additional disks added to the machine.
2. Configure additional network interfaces added to the machine<./li>
3. Execute scripts within the guest to install applications, or perform additional configuration.

If the guest agent is installed in the template and the appropriate properties are configured it will automatically perform the first two items as part of the vCAC provisioning process. In order to execute scripts you will need to tell vCAC to inform the guest agents of the scripts that need to be executed.

Installing the vCAC 6.0 Linux guest agent in a Linux Template

1. We first need to downloading the Linux Guest agent packages from the vCAC appliance home page. You can download the Linux Guest agents from https://FQNDOFVCACVA:5480/installer/
2. After you download the agent package it will need to be extracted. Inside the package are a number of different versions of the agent for varying supported distributions of Linux.
3. The template that the guest agent is being installed in will need to be connected to the network to properly install the agent. Enure the template can communicate on the network and is able to reach the vCAC IaaS Server.
4. You will need to select the appropriate version and insert it into your template. There are a number of ways you can do this. You can use SFTP, WINSCP, or my personal favorite method is to put all the packages into an ISO and mount the ISO to the VM. THis offers flexibility and easy access for multiple Linux versions and distributions.
5. Now that we have the guest agent accessible to the template machine we need to do a few things so you will either need to utilize the VM console or SSH to the Linux machine within Putty or native ssh within a MAC etc. Whichever method you use you will need to login as the root user.
6. We need to make sure that SELinux is disabled on the template. We can do this by editing the /etc/sysconfig/selinux file and setting SELINUX=disabled.
7. Before we install the agent we need to get the SSL certificate for the vCAC IaaS server on the Linux template. The easiest way to do this is to use Firefox to download the SSL Certificate. In firefox open the https://FQDN_OF_IAAS_Server. Once it opens click the Lock in the address bar before the address, then click more information, and then click View Certificate.
8. Next click on the details tab and click the export button to export the certificate. You should save the certificate as a .crt file and ensure it’s type is PEM x.509. I sometimes will include the ssl certificate on the ISO I created to make it easier to get into the tempalte with agents.
9. Now we need to do is install the guest agent. We can do this by running rpm -ivh gugent_agent_package_for_your_distribution.rpm.
10. Once the gugent agent is installed we need to copy the SSL certificate to /usr/share/gugent.
11. Now that we have the SSL certificate in the template go to /usr/share/gugent and run openssl x509 -in saved.crt -out cert.pem -outform PEM
12. To complete the gugent agent installtion we need to run the following command from the folder /usr/share/gugent ./installgugent.sh FQDN_OF_IAAS_SERVER ssl.
13. Now that the installation is complete you can shutdown the VM and convert it to a template to be used for provisioning.

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