join domain and software component in same machine impossible?

[kallischlauch]

Hey all,

i'm going in circles for months now on this with vRA 7.0.1 ... i'm desperate, VMware support does not know what to look at either. Maybe someone here managed to do something that should be very simple ...

we deploy machines into different VLANs (each service their own). There is no DHCP in those VLANs. I think this is standard setup in every enterprise. All those machines get static IP from vRA and need to join the domain.

if I use vSphere guest customization then domain jojn sometimes fails (guest OS customization timeout). sometimes the NIC is not connected when it tries to join domain. it fails. timeout after 2 hours

VMware KB says flat out VRA+static+domain-join it is not possible, use guest agent script: Cannot join a virtual machine to a domain when using vSphere and VMware vRealize Automation Network ...

This works perfectly fine if its a bare infra machine. However ... as soon as I add a software component to this blueprint (no matter what content, example install IIS) the guest script to join the domain runs a 2nd time (why???) and this causes failure of course, deployment is torn down.

I thought I was smart and just modified my script to do error checking (if it ran before then just don't join domain again) but the software component (install IIS) never runs. its stuck in status "waiting"

it seems this was never tested. I can't reliably deploy machines that join domain using vRA provided IP and add software components .. i could scream ...

anyone?

Kalli

[rcporto]

I have a similar problem when trying using Guest Agent (to add the requester to local administrators group) and Software Component (to install IIS) and have not found any solution yet, see: Unable to make GuestAgent and Software Components working together

[rmav01]

I thought I was smart and just modified my script to do error checking (if it ran before then just don't join domain again) but the software component (install IIS) never runs. its stuck in status "waiting"

it seems this was never tested. I can't reliably deploy machines that join domain using vRA provided IP and add software components .. i could scream ...

This sounds similar to something we were experiencing in our lab environment. Long story short, we would try provisioning an Ubuntu machine with MySQL installed via software component and the request would fail after machine provisioning. We saw the same behavior of the software component task being stuck in status "waiting" and the request would fail out after a few hours. Turns out the way we fixed it was re-installing the Gugent/Bootstrap agents on our template machine and validating that the service was running properly. This article credited to Eiad Al-Aqqad from virtualizationteam.com helped to explain the installation process better than the VMware documentation, and it includes Windows:

vRealize Automation 7 Bootstrap Installation

One word of advice when installing this on windows is to use the CMD window, not PowerShell to run the batch install job. If you open up that batch script it uses there are some commands in there that are aliased to different PowerShell commands and it may not work.

Hopefully this works out for you. Good luck!

[kallischlauch]

Hey,

thanks for your answer. Similar job here, we use software components to create SQL Always-on cluster. But as soon as you utilise this workaround (which uses guest agent, just not dragged into the blueprint)

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=20562...‌ it all falls apart. no matter if you use it for domain join or add owner to local admins.

machine as is with software component no problem, as soon as we use the hack in KB the software components dont run anymore.

I see what you say about the guest agent, I had so much hassle installing it, I finally came across someone who suffered enough and created a powershell script to install the agent on windows  The missing prepare_vra_template » Extending Clouds

I'm now using orchestrator to get the machine to join the domain and see how I get from there. I'll escalate it to VMware, it's clearly an error.

Thanks again for chiming in,

[kallischlauch]

thats exactly it Richardson, I have the same problem. I'll go and escalate

Kalli

[GrantOrchardVMw]

Kalli, can you share the PR number please? I'd like to take a look.