VMware vFabricTM Application
Director Release Notes
vFabric Application Director 5.0 | 29 November
2012 | Build: 879382
Last Document Update: 05 December 2012 |
These release notes cover the following topics:
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.
Update Life Cycle and Release Automation Support
- 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
Hybrid Cloud Support
Ability to deploy application blueprints
to the Amazon EC2 environment
Windows Support
- 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
Enterprise Readiness Support
- 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
Auto-Bind to Other Properties Support
Automatically bind properties while
modeling application blueprints with greater efficiency and accuracy
REST APIs Support
Automate application deployment to
the cloud, update a deployed application, and other provisioning operations
Event Notification Support
Allows authorized programs to listen
for occurrences of specific events related to deploying applications, updating an
existing deployment, and teardown processes from vFabric Application Director
Other vFabric Application Director Documentation
vFabric Application Director 5.0 includes the following product documentation.
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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