vCAC 5.2 Blueprint does not dynamically update back-end template changes

VMware vCAC is a wonderful product that enables you to manage and deploy VM’s across multiple vendor platform and also takes Cloud to a different level.

But sometimes there are these little things they forget to fix when they put the product out in the market. Especially the vCAC 5.1(Previously know as DynamicOps) which was released in a hurry after the acquisition of the same from DynamicOps. But most of those bugs/issues were fixed in the next release which came out after some time. But fortunately/unfortunately i ended up facing this bug in one of my customer’s environment.

To give a little background on the setup, we all know that vCAC blueprints are backed by the templates on your vCenter which will actually act like the master copy/ reference for all the machines that are deployed through the cloud. Now imagine i have a template that has a 2GB RAM, 2vCPUs and a 30GB hard disk. I have a blueprint created for the same and everything is working fine.

One day I realized that the machines that are deployed from this template are running out of space soon after their deployment. I get lot of complaints from my end users about the drive filling up.

So what do I do now? I ask my end users to reconfigure the machines with extra space and make sure this does not happen in my future deployments.  And how do I make sure of it? I edit my template and add more space on the disk so all the machines deployed form it have required space.

Now I go ahead and edit the template by converting it to machine on the vCenter. Extend the disk by editing the settings and also expanding the partition in the OS. And i convert the machine back to template and i’m all set.

Next, I go to my vCAC Administrator portal and do a manual data collection to make sure the change gets updated. This is where the problem starts.

When I come back to the template and see, the default volume from the template has not changed. It still says 30GB for disk. So i browse and select the template again. Nope! no use.

So this is the bug i talk about. vCAC does not update this dynamically. So what to do you ask?  I’m sure this is fixed in the later versions but i haven’t tested it. The only workaround is to create a new, similar blueprint and map the template again so it picks up new values. As i mentioned this issue might have been fixed in the later releases, hopefully.

If you are making such changes to your template, be sure to keep this in mind. Hope it helps someone who runs into this issue.

 

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