vCACCAFE 6.2 module not compatible with standalone orchestrator 5.2.2?

[schistad]

I've recently upgraded vRA from 6.0.1 to 6.1, and as part of that process I ran into an issue loading the vCACCAFE plugin for vRO where it remained in "will be imported at next reload" state. I eventually figured out that this was resolved by upgrading my Orchestrator instance from 5.5.1 to 5.5.2.

Today i went ahead with the 6.2 upgrade, and on importing the 6.2 version of the vRO plugin I ran into the same issue, and have thus far been unable to resolve it. In catalina.out I can see tons of reference errors while it attempts to load the plugin, and I also noticed that Orchestrator appears to be bundled with a separate library called NNN-cafe61.lib which I suspect might be a depencency for VCACCAFE 6.1 that needs an update for 6.2

Since vRA is bundled with vRO 6.0 I figured there might be some undiscovered issues with the standalone 5.2.2?

Anyhow, I expect that I'll need to downgrade my package to 6.1 to get vRO working again but that's okay.

[iiliev]

vCACCAFE plug-in 6.1 is built against vRO 5.5.2

vCACCAFE plug-in 6.2 is built against vRO 6.0.0

I'm not sure if vCACCAFE plug-in 6.2 is supposed to be backward compatible with vRO 5.5.2 (I'm not familiar with this plug-in; perhaps there are some info in the release notes?). The main problem is that ATM there is no standalone release of vRO appliance 6.0.0 to upgrade your vRO 5.5.2 instance. So if you don't want to use the single vRA 6.2/vRO 6.0 appliance, your options are:

  (1) deploy another vRA 6.2 appliance and use only the embedded vRO 6.0 (it should be possible to stop some of the vRA service to save resources), or

  (2) wait a bit for vRO 6.0.0 appliance to be released (other customers requested it so it should be released soon) or for vRO 6.0.1 release (will appear together with vSphere 6.0 release sometime in Q1 or Q2'2015).

[sanchezs]

Just to add to Ilian's answer that the vCAC plug-in 6.2 won't run on a vCO 5.5.2 server due to some library dependencies that the plug-in needs and that are embedded within vCO (and that are different between 5.5.2 and 6.0.0).

And for his proposed solution #1 (use a vRA appliance as standalone vRO 6.0.0) there's a public KB article about how to do that: VMware KB: External vRealize Orchestrator appliance becomes unavailable after upgrading to VMware vR...

[gradinka]

KB has been updated, and now standalone vRO 6.0.0 appliance is also available for download via support request.

both options are equally valid:

either convert vRA 6.2 to vRO, or contact support and get the standalone vRO 6.0

in both cases, the actual vRO bits are exactly the same.