vRSLCM – Binary Mapping from Local are not listed – Solved
As mentioned in a previous post this week, I am looking at vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager (vRSLCM). I’m coming at this as a newbie, and I am trying to use it in much the same way as one of our customers would use it. I previously stood up vRSLCM, so now I am at the point of where I would like to deploy another vRealize application, namely vRealize Operations. Rather than pulling the OVA image from My VMware, I wanted to see the behaviour when I manually download the latest vROps OVA, version 8.1.1, and store it directly on the vRSLCM appliance in the /data directory. This should then allow me to discover it from the vRSLCM > Settings > Binary Mapping section in the vRSLCM UI. The issue I had is that even though the request to add the OVA seemed to succeed, the product did not appear in the Binary Mapping list of products.
I found one reference in the official documentation stating that if the checksum of the downloaded OVA was not correct, then this could be a reason for the product to not appear in the Binary Mapping. I examined the checksum of the downloaded OVA (md5sum, sha1sum and sha256sum are all available on the vRSLCM appliance), and the checksum matched those reported on MyVMware for the OVA. So the downloaded OVA was fine.
I checked with one of my colleagues, Brian O’Connell, and he told me that we maintain checksum files for all products on the appliance. If the product does not match the checksum, it is not displayed. The files are located in sub-directories in the following location on the vRSLCM appliance.
/data/vm-config/vmrepo/checksumRepo
The vRealize product checksums are in this directory.
/data/vm-config/vmrepo/checksumRepo/vr
I navigated to this location to examine the checksum for vRealize Operations. The first thing I noticed is that there was no checksum file for vRealize Operations version 8.1.1. There were only files for vROps 8.0.0, 8.0.1 and 8.1.0. And then the penny dropped. The version that I was trying to upload was not yet supported in the version of vRSLCM that I am using.
I then tried to retrieve vROps from MyVMware rather than the local OVA, and again the latest version of vRealize Operations available to me is v8.1.0. I was able to successfully add this to my Binary Mapping.
I was now able to go ahead and create a new environment and deploy my vROps 8.1.0 appliance.
The lesson here is to make sure that the vRealize product that you are trying to deploy via vRSLCM is supported. I will file an internal feature request to display an error when the product version that is being added to the binary mapping is not supported or does not have a valid checksum.
You can learn more about vRealize Operations here.