Posted on by Sid Smith

vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 6.0 – Installing the vCAC 6.0 IaaS Server

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

Now that we have installed and configured the vCAC 6.0 Identity Appliance and the vCAC 6.0 Virtual Appliance we now need to install the vCAC 6.0 IaaS Server. The IaaS server is all the former vCAC 5.x and earlier components. The vCAC 6.0 IaaS Server includes the following components:

  • IaaS Reopsitory
  • IaaS Server Service
  • IaaS DEM’s – Orchestrator and Worker
  • IaaS Proxy Agents

If you are familiar with vCAC 5.2 and earlier you will notice the architecture for the IaaS server is the same. There are some important changes to functionality that this component provides however. The IaaS server no longer handles the following:

  • vCAC Admin Portal – Now in the vCAC 6.0 VA
  • vCAC Self Service Portal – Now in the vCAC 6.0 VA
  • Cost Profiles – Now in the vCAC 6.0 VA
  • Approvals – Now in the vCAC 6.0 VA
  • Authentication – Now in the vCAC 6.0 VA

From an integration perspective the vCAC IaaS server still supports state transition workflows and the same Windows Workflow Foundation workflow system as well as the custom machine menu operation workflows. You however won’t be using the custom machine menu operation workflows much with the new day two operations that leverage vCO. No longer are you limited to 4 custom actions and they are completely vCO driven.

Installing the vCAC 6.0 IaaS Server


Ok so on to installing the vCAC 6.0 IaaS Server. You will need a Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 VM to perform the installation on. The Server should have the following:

  • IIS Server
  • .Net Framework 4.5
  • MS SQL Server 2008 R2 or 2012 – Can be local or remote if remote need to install connectivity tools

There is configuration above what I listed above, but the new installer has the pre-req checker built in and will let you know all that needs to be configured with step-by-step instrauctions so I didn’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel.

1. To begin on the Windows Server that you will be installing the vCAC 6.0 IaaS server on you need to open your web browser and navigate to https://{FQDN of vCAC VA}:5480. Login using root and the password you set. The click the “IaaS install?” tab. Once there you will see an option to download the “setup.exe” for the IaaS Components.
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2. You’ll notice when you download it the file name has the url to the vCAC 6.0 VA this is used to auto populate some fields to ensure that you connect to the proper VA host. Go ahead and launch the installer.
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3. Accept the license agreement and click next.
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4. Next you will notice the Appliance host name is auto populated for you based on the file name. Input user root and the root password for your vCAC 6.0 VA appliance and click Next.
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5. For this example we are going to perform a complete install, however if you need you can do a custom installation and only install specific components. This is useful for distributed installation. Click Next.
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6. You will now be brought to the Verify Prerequisites page. Make sure you fix any errors. If you are using a remote SQL Database don’t worry about the SQL TCP/IP errors you can use the bypass option to get passed it. Once all errors ara fixed click next.
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7. There is a bit of information to input here on the Server and Accounts Settings page. The top half you are going to specify the service account you will use for the vCAC IaaS services as well as a passphrase used to encrypt data in the database. On the bottom half your SQL server database info. Once you have completely filled out all the information click next.
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8. Next on the Component registry page we have a number of things to do. The value for the Server field should be auto populated so you can go ahead and click the Load button to determine the SSO Default Tenant from the vCAC 6 VA server. Once that is complete click Download to download the server certificate. Make sure to check Accept Certificate. Next we need to input the SSO administrator credentials these will be administrator@{your default domain} that was created when we setup the vCAC 6.0 Identity Appliance. Click test to validate your settings. Next enter the hostname for the IaaS Server and click test. If all has passed click next.
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9. On this page we are going to name our Dem Worker and Dem Orchestrator. We also have the option to install a vSphere agent. In this example we are going to install it now so we need to specify an agent name as well as an Endpoint name. Make note of your Endpoint name as you will need it when we configure the endpoint in the vCAC web configuration. Click next when finished.
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10. Click Install
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11. While the vCAC 6.0 IaaS installer is running you will see a while box showing you what it’s doing. This is great if you eery want to do an automated installation. This shows you the commands that are executed for each component. You will also notice that it pulls the component installation bits and puts them in users\current user\AppData\Local\Temp\1\vCAC so you can grab them from there and use for automated installations. This is also where the installation log files are kept.
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12. Once the installation finishes you can optionally select Guide me through the initial system configuration and click Finish. If you select the Guide me through the initial system configuration the installer will automatically launch the vCAC 6 VA web interface and once logged in will start the Goals Wizard.
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13. If you selected the option to be guided through the initial setup your web browser will open and you will be presented with a login for vCAC. Initially the browser will have pointed to https://{FQDN of VCAC VA}/web-ui-app and then it will redirect to the Identity Server for login. Once logged in it will redirect you back to the VA URL and you will be logged in.
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14. On the initial login it will also open the Goals Wizard on the Left. It will look like the image below designed to step you through the initial configuration. I however am not going to leverage the goals wizard when we begin to do the configuration. If you click the little white box with the << sybols in it the Goals Wizard will close.
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15. That completes the installation of the vCAC 6 IaaS Server. In my next post we will begin the configuration of the tenants.
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One Reply to “vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 6.0 – Installing the vCAC 6.0 IaaS Server”

  1. Pingback: vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 6.0 – Adding Endpoints — DailyHypervisor

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