vCloud Director Archives

I have had this issue twice now, where deploying vCD via the Autolab PXE boot option on the vCD VM fails. As far as I can tell, the process seems to fail on the Oracle Express DB installation, due to the RPM not being a valid package. The vCloud Director steps seem to be the same for Autolab 1.0 or 1.1, so the following applies to both.

error: /root/oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm: not an rpm package (or package manifest)

You can see the error I was getting in the screenshot I captured during boot time below. I had checked the RPM file and everything else to ensure it was in place, and indeed it was. Even vCD installs via the script, although it of course does not work due to the database not being there.

Here is the process I used to correct my vCD install.

Allow VM to finish booting, even with the missing oracle DB.
Use PuTTy to SSH to the vCD VM (either direct from your VC or DC VM, or if you have the route setup, from your host machine (in the case you are using VMware Workstation for example). Default credentials are in the Autolab setup guide document
Open up the “Build” share on the NAS VM, and location the vcd-install script. Default location: \\192.168.199.7\Build\Automate\CentOS\vcd-install (open this with a text editor)
Locate the method for each section of the install script. There is a section for each process in the script. For each method, copy out the entire block, paste it into a new text document, and remove any exclamation marks from any “echo” parts of the script. I found that manually tracking through this script using PuTTy gave me issues with the exclamation marks being misinterpreted by the shell, so I removed these. You’ll need to get a script block for the following sections and do this:
- verify() {}
- installOracle() {}
- configureOracle() {}
- generateCertificates() {}
- installvCD() {}
- configurevCD() {}
Remember to copy the whole block, including the start and end braces {} – paste these into a new text document, remove the exclamation marks, then copy-paste them back into your shell open in PuTTy. Hit enter, and the method will be entered and ready for use.
Once all the methods have been copied in, you can simply type the name of the method, followed by enter to execute them. By doing it this way, you can manually step through the process and figure out where any potential remaining issues may be. This script is normally executed during the PXE boot installation process so you don’t really get a chance to slowly track through it.
Type each method in until you reach and complete the last “configurevCD” one
- verify
- installOracle
- configureOracle
- generateCertificates
- installvCD
- configurevCD
You may find that the generateCertificates and installvCD methods complete and echo out that they had already been completed prior – this is fine.
After configurevCD finished, all being well, you should now have vCD started, and you should be able to browse over to https://vcd.lab.local and finish the initial configuration via the vCD web page.

Other tips to try would be to:

MD5 hash check the RPM of the Oracle Express database that you download and place in your Build share – make sure it is not a corrupted file
Ensure you have the correct version of vCD and the Oracle Express database downloaded

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Author Bio:

David Malmborg works with Dell. When David is not working, he enjoys spending time with his two kids. For more information on cloud computing, David recommends clicking here.