VMware have released a minor update for vRealize Automation (vRA) 8. This is my experience of attemtping to update the instance running in my home lab.
Update Preparation
In the Release Notes for 8.0.1 there’s a section for performing an upgrade. A couple of items in this section jump out. Firstly, that the vRA product supports upgrading from vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (LCM), with a link on the process. The second is an explicit mention of disk space requirements. Based on this, the first thing I checked was the free space for the two partitions mentioned.
VMUG recent added the vRealize Suite 2019 to their EVALExperience offering. For those not familiar with it, EVALExperience is part of the paid “Advantage” member in VMUG. This paid membership includes discounts on training and other benefits. This is on top of benefits of free membership.
This new addition means it’s now possible to get a 365-day license for all the components of the vRealize Suite 2019, including vRealize Automation 8. The license is for personal use in a home lab. I had previously tried updating the license on my vRA 8 installation from an Advanced to an Enterprise one, using Lifecycle Manager. It didn’t like that.
After spending a lot of time looking at the web interface for vRealize Automation 8 (vRA 8), I decided to look under the hook a bit. One of the first things I looked at was the logs. It seems one of the primary logs that vRA 8 uses is /var/log/vmware-vmsvc.log Upon viewing this log, I was greeted with the following spam:
[2019-12-05T11:47:54.126Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] GetDiskInfo: ERROR: Partition name buffer too small
[2019-12-05T11:47:54.126Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] Failed to get disk info.
[2019-12-05T11:48:24.128Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] GetDiskInfo: ERROR: Partition name buffer too small
[2019-12-05T11:48:24.128Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] Failed to get disk info.
[2019-12-05T11:48:54.127Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] GetDiskInfo: ERROR: Partition name buffer too small
[2019-12-05T11:48:54.128Z] [ warning] [guestinfo] Failed to get disk info.
As shown by the timestamps, this error will repeat every 30 seconds, resulting in this log being totally flooded with this error. I also confirmed this error was happening in another instance than my own. Upon googling the message, I found a Github issue entry that referenced this and how it can be caused by the very long paths with Kubernetes. vRA 8 uses Kubernetes heavily. The code fix that resolved this issue appears to have been folded into the v11.0.1 release of the open-vm-tools. When checking the version on the vRA 8 appliance, we can see the following:
That explains that
When checking the package info via yum, the versions available range from 10.2.0 to 10.3.10 from the repositories that vRA is configured to use. So it appears updating isn’t an option at this time.
The Server Broker section of vRealize Automation 8 contains the items that your consumers will interact with the most – the Catalog, and the Deployments tab where they can review the status of their requests. It also has some administration areas, such as Content & Policies and Infrastructure
Towards the end of the Easy Install wizard for vRealize Automation 8 (vRA 8), a link is provided for the vRealize Automation 8 UI. Accessing this link will load a landing page that shows a short piece of text and a link to a login button.
