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mdartez_he
Contributor
Contributor

Mass Deploy vROPs Agent (EP Agent)

I am having a hard time finding documentation on deploying the new vROPs agents (either one 6.1/6.2)

I found some on the documentation center:  vRealize Operations Manager 6.1 Documentation Center

Unfortunately, none of the suggestions tell you what to change, nor how to deploy it.  It's getting a bit frustrating since we have 1000+ servers to get this sucker out to.  I want to modify the agents.property file but even that file is convoluted and the comments inside it are not very descriptive.  Has anyone deployed this with SCCM or BatchPatch?  How would you do it?

FYI here's VMware's official process:  vRealize Operations Manager 6.1 Documentation Center

As you can see...not very descriptive.  Doesn't indicate properties, examples, nothing.  Just terrible.

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mark_j
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Many folks will be deploying the agent using existing software deployment processes, such as Patchlink, SCCM, etc. Some folks also use vRO as the deployment platform. On the deployment parameters, you'd follow the guidance for the silent script/automated installation available here:  http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=213328...

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TheCajunItalian
Contributor
Contributor

The documentation is incredibly sparse and doesn't really say too much.

.EXE files should have switches built in - our SCCM deployment is not picking up anything outside of an INI file which doesn't reveal much.

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mark_j
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

You'd need to pre-populate agent.properties before running the setup. Setup will run, then ingest your parameters from the file. http://pubs.vmware.com/vrealizeoperationsmanager-61/index.jsp#com.vmware.vcom.core.doc/GUID-52BE9969...


When deployed en-mass, we'll have deployment scripts run, populate the agent. properties file dynamically (including calculating+adding the password hash), then initiate the setup. To calc the hash dynamically, the source script needs to have the password clear text usually, so as a clean-up process we'll have the script self-destruct and only leave agent.properties with the hashed pw.


As a best practice, always use a service account for the EPO agents that only has the AgentManager role, so even if the password got out in the wild, it wouldn't be able to cause harm to vR Ops.

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TheCajunItalian
Contributor
Contributor

We actually figured out a great work around - we created a .bat file nested at the root of the EPagent folder that references both commands:

cd %~dp0\bin

ep-agent.bat install && ep-agent.bat start

^ You copy the folder over to the machine with SCCM or BatchPatch or VCM, run the batch with the above commands at the root of the folder and it goes through with out issues.  We built to deployments this way, one with the install command and one with just the removal command.  We edit the properties files before we deploy this out*

The fact that we have to do this is incredibly silly - mass deployments of agents should be much, much easier then this.