vim3waittoolsstarted failing

[steveschofield]

I have a workflow we've added a few vim3waittoolsstarted actions to ensure the tools are started before executing a few 'run program in guest' operations.  we are experiencing an issue where the tools aren't be started, reaching the timeout and destroying the vm we are building.  We are using the latest vCO vSphere plugin, and vCO embedded with vCAC.  Anyone else seen this behavior, is it a problem with connecting to vCenter?  We are running 5.5.0 (not update 1).  We are evaluting vCAC currently.

[stvkpln]

I use the action that waits for the hostname to be set to whatever is expected to, and it runs fine. Whenever I've had issues, it's been because the inputs into the action are not set correctly or have been inadvertently reset due to a scripted action where they were accidentally added as outputs due to click happiness (mainly the check and timeout values are set to null after an attribute reset). Have you watched the vCO workflow during execution to see what's occurring and what the state of the vCenter VM is? In particular, you should see if the workflow is actually sitting there and waiting, as opposed to timing out nearly immediately.

[steveschofield]

I'll be working on this Monday AM.  I'll check as I'll have others watching with me.  It's baffleing, since introducing these wait things, it's been unstable.  I'll let you know the results.

[stvkpln]

They're a little bit quirky, so if you don't set your inputs right to those actions, they won't work as expected (that's been my experience, anyhow). I've had my fair share of pain getting it working correctly -- I need it in there for my provisioned state workflow to not kick off until the VM is up and the hostname is set correctly (meaning sysprep and/or customization is done). A lot of debugging state workflows comes down to having to watch the process run through and catch the errors when it occurs so you know what the behavior is and what the error was.