VMware vFabric^TM Application Director Release Notes

These release notes cover the following topics:

• What's New
• Other vFabric Application Director Documentation
• Known Issues

What's New

VMware vFabric Application Director, a core building block in the VMware Application Management suite, is an application provisioning, update life cycle, and release automation solution that simplifies the creation and standardization of application deployment topologies across hybrid cloud services. This release includes the following new features.

• Updates to code and configuration on existing deployed applications
• Change impact analysis, dependency mapping, and change notification during or post update process
• Scale existing deployed applications

• Provision applications on Windows-based platforms
• Create custom .Net applications
• Predefined sample Windows-based applications such as Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange
• Native support for PowerShell and Batch scripts enables any kind of Windows-based application deployments

• One click deployment of applications to self-service application users
• Support for LDAP, helps customers manage user privileges in one place
• Ensure that users can leverage existing custom catalog services and application blueprints by exporting and importing packages between different vFabric Application Director 5.0 appliances

Other vFabric Application Director Documentation

• Using VMware vFabric Application Director Guide
• VMware vFabric Application Director Catalog Services Guide
• VMware vFabric Application Director API Programming Guide

Known Issues

Installation

• 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.
• VMRC console plug-in is supported only on Windows with a Firefox 14 and Firefox 15 Web browser. If the VMRC console plug-in does not connect to the deployed virtual machine from 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, you cannot install many applications and RPM packages with SELinux enabled.
  Workaround: Disable SELinux by default when creating new templates. When using a sample template for download, you must disable SELinux 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
• Prior to deploying a vFabric Gemfire 6.6.0 service in an environment with a proxy server, update the proxy arguments for the RPM install command in the service install script. The following example shows the proxy argument values for the RPM install command.
  rpm --httpproxy proxy.vmware.com --httpport 3128 -Uvh --force http://repo.vmware.com/pub/rhel${REV}/vfabric/${VERSION}/${REPO_RPM}
  Replace the HTTP proxy host and HTTP proxy port values.
• 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.

Application Modeling

• While defining values for an array property make sure that, you enclose the array of string values in square brackets.
• If there is a cyclic dependency between nodes in an application blueprint, the execution plan is rendered as blank in the deployment profile without displaying an error message.
• In some instances, when creating a deployment environment for Amazon EC2, us-west-1b might be designated as the Availability Zone. Ignore the option us-west-1b and type the applicable Availability Zone for your Amazon VPC.
• vFabric Application Director assigns the appropriate memory values for an Amazon EC2 instance. Manually configuring the memory settings might cause a failure in deployment.

Application Deployment and Update

• The VM Details status window on the deployment summary page might render blank without an error message.
  Workaround: Refresh your Web browser.
• In the Deployment Profile wizard if you have only one cloud network available, when you select the Map Details button, the network is not added to the Cloud Network Name column and the Next button is enabled.
  Workaround: Before you proceed to the next page in the Deployment Profile wizard, select your cloud network from the Cloud Network Name drop-down menu.
• In some cases, when a deployment task fails, tasks that are running in other nodes display an In progress status infinitely even though the tasks have completed successfully.
• If a deployed virtual machine has multiple NICs on a NAT-Routed network with a DHCP service, then vFabric Application Director cannot get DHCP IP addresses for some of the NICs from vCloud Director.
• In some instances, when the vFabric Application Director server times out, the Web interface displays the error message, Unable to communicate with server. Please contact the administrator.
  Workaround: Reopen the application or deployment.
• If you shut down the vFabric Application Director appliance while application deployments are in progress and restart later, the interruption might not allow the deployment status details to be updated properly.
• While creating or renaming a cloud tunnel for an Amazon EC2 region, make sure that in the CLI command, the cloud tunnel name is not enclosed in quotation marks.

LDAP

• If you use an LDAP account with First Name and Last Name property values specified and use that username as the LDAP server query username within the LDAP configuration, you might receive an error when you run the test-ldap-server-config command, which could prevent you from logging in to the Web interface.
  Workaround: Specify the full LDAP server query user name for example, john@domain.com instead of only the user name.

User Interface

• In some cases, after you close an error message box in the Web interface you might not be able to reopen it.
• If an application has more than 12 application versions, you might experience problems when navigating between the application versions.
• When attempting to perform copy and paste operations to define an action script for a property or attempting to paste a property value, the Adobe Flash-based user interface page might become unresponsive.
  Workaround: Make sure that you are running the supported Adobe Flash Player 11.2 or later in your Web browser. Copy the script text into an application such as Notepad and paste the text to the Web interface.

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