VMware vFabric^TM Application Director Release Notes

vFabric Application Director 1.0 | 15 March 2012 | Build: 596943

Last Document Update: 15 March 2012

These release notes cover the following topics:

Key Features
Other vFabric Application Director Documentation
Known Issues

Key Features

VMware vFabric Application Director is an innovative application provisioning solution. With its catalog of standard components, vFabric Application Director simplifies and automates deployments of multitier enterprise applications in hybrid cloud environments. Enterprise users can quickly standardize, deploy, configure, and scale their complex applications in highly dynamic cloud environments. These applications can range from simple Web applications to complex custom and packaged applications. vFabric Application Director provides important features across these categories:

Simple and Automated Application Provisioning

Graphical drag-and-drop canvas for creating application blueprints that simplifies planning and deploying complex applications.
Intuitive point-and-click style user interface for customizing scripts, overriding configurations, and executing deployments.
Comprehensive deployment execution plans that call out custom scripts to fix security related vulnerabilities during application deployments and assist in troubleshooting deployment failures.

Cloud Ready

True separation between applications and infrastructure enables reusing the same application blueprint on multiple virtual and cloud infrastructures.
Automatically generated deployment execution plans enable performing audits before deploying regulated applications.
Open and extensible architecture provides flexibility to select your choice of scripting language.

Standardized Use of Application Components and Middleware

Ready to use out-of-the-box middleware installation and configurable services.
Optimized for the vFabric Middleware Stack.
Integrates with cloud templates to leverage existing investments in cloud catalogs.

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Known Issues

The known issues for vFabric Application Director 1.0 are grouped by topic in the following sections.

Installation

It is recommended that you install the vFabric Application Director appliance on a direct network with a static IP address and a unique host name to avoid any functionality problems.
When instantiating the vFabric Application Director vApp to your cloud from the vCloud Director catalog, changing the default full name at the Configure Virtual Machines step causes the vFabric Application Director vApp to fail to start up.
You see an error message similar to the following:
- Unable to start vApp "My-ApplicationDirector".
- Invalid vApp properties: Argument 'none' not a valid network name.
Workaround: If you need to replace the full name of the vFabric Application Director virtual machine, edit the properties of the vFabric Application Director virtual machine after the instantiation process completes.
If the VMRC console plug-in does not connect to the deployed virtual machine by vFabric Application Director, use the vCloud Director VMRC console plug-in to access the virtual machine.

vFabric Application Director Catalog

When authoring a new service, many applications and RPM packages cannot be installed with SELinux enabled.
Workaround: Disable SELinux by default when creating new templates. When using a sample template for download, SELinux must be disabled as part of the service install script. The following example shows how you can disable SELinux on a CentOS operating system.
if [ -x /usr/sbin/selinuxenabled ] && /usr/sbin/selinuxenabled; then
if [ -x /usr/sbin/setenforce ]; then
/usr/sbin/setenforce Permissive
else
echo 'SELinux is enabled. This may cause installation to fail.'
fi
fi

Application Modeling

In some cases, if an application blueprint is using multiple versions of the same service with minor version numbers adding up to an existing version number for example, Apache 2.1.1 and Apache 2.2, then one service version might override the other version during a deployment.
Workaround: Make sure that your service versions are uniquely identified using the qualifier text box of the service version.
vFabric Application Director supports vCloud Director configurations that use LDAP for vCloud Director authentication. However, vFabric Application Director does not support the configuration where the same LDAP user is managing multiple vCloud Director organizations or the user is a vCloud Director system administrator and managing multiple vCloud Director organizations.
Workaround: To enable vFabric Application Director to access the vCloud Director organizations, create locally authenticated users in vCloud Director.

Application Deployment

On rare occasions after prolonged usage, vFabric Application Director renders the Blueprint, Execution Plan, and VM Console tabs as blank.
Workaround: Log out of vFabric Application Director and log in again.
In some instances, the vFabric Application Director Web interface might display error messages such as, Unable to connect to vFabric Application Director Server or Channel Disconnected when an action is performed, even though the appliance is running.
Workaround: Perform the action again.
If the vFabric Application Director appliance is shut down while application deployments are in progress and restarted later, the interruption might not allow the deployment status details to be updated properly.
If a deployed virtual machine has more than one network interface cards (NICs) on a NAT-Routed network with DHCP service, then vFabric Application Director cannot get DHCP IP addresses for some of the NICs from vCloud Director.
During the installation of the sample RabbitMQ service on Ubuntu, the apt-get command might intermittently fail with incorrect checksums depending on the network infrastructure.
Workaround: Redeploy the application deployment or contact your system administrator if the failure persists.