Debugging vApp deployment issues - vApp details storage location?

[trodemaster]

We are trying to debug a number of issues with deployment of vApps and I would like to dump all the details. Ideally I could diff a working catalog vapp vs a broken one to see how they differ. How are the vApp details stored? I'm not above spelunking into the vcloud DB to extract this info. We suspect that exporting them as a .ovf and looking at that detail does not give us all the detail we need. Thanks, Blake

[IamTHEvilONE]

Blake,

All the metadata is in the DB, and I wouldn't really dive into there without good reason.

If you have a 'broken' vApp after deployment, why not deploy/fix/capture again?  Esp in 5.5 when you can capture and overwrite an existing vApp in catalog (it'll update the version number associated to the vApp).    

Cheers,

Jon

[trodemaster]

Hey Jon I think the issue we have warrants dumping the vApp details from the DB. The issue is related to SR# 14425263901 that is causing us much pain.. We are seeing guest customization failures happing to at set of around 15 different single vm vApps. If we build a vApp from scratch it works well once but after checking it into the catalog and back out we see failures. This happens across different OS versions from win7 through 2012r2. I'm suspecting some kind of corruption. The issue has been escalated with our TAM and sales team but I can't afford to wait weeks to get a resolution. If you have some details on how I can extract the info from the DB I would appreciate it. The only way we have found to 'fix' the existing vm/vapp is to export it from virtual center as a vm .ovf. Then import this directly into the catalog. At that point it seems to be stored as a vm and not a full vApp. vApp's created using these VM's deploy and customize correctly. This workaround is burning hours like you can't imagine as we need to rev these images. Thanks, Blake

[barnette08]

Out of curiosity, what are the specific failures/errors you are getting when you deploy them from the catalog?

[trodemaster]

We are seeing guest customization fail regularly. IP's are not set and administrator/root passwords are not correct. Today I was able to reproduce the guest customization script field is getting corrupted if you add a vm to an existing vApp. I suspect we have a couple of issues working together. I would really like to view the other fields in the vApp and see if their values are corrupted.