Last week I spent some time creating and updating vCloud Director templates. It’s a very long process if you want to do everything perfectly. You know, one mistake and you have to deploy the vApp, change the configuration, update metadata and add vApp to catalog one more time. During this process, I faced the problem with CentOS 7.3. It was a fresh installation from official DVD iso. Everything worked fine except one thing – customization. Of course, I chose the open-vm-tools package and made sure that daemon is running, but customization didn’t want to work properly. Finally, I found the resolution of my problem, so If you cannot customize CentOS on vCloud, it’s the article for you.
I cannot customize CentOS on vCloud Director – what should I do?
First, look at your toolsDeployPkg.log. It may contain something like this:
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Launching cleanup. Command to exec : /bin/rm sizeof ProcessInternal is 56 Returning, pending output from stdout Returning, pending output from stderr Process exited normally after 0 seconds, returned 0 No more output from stdout No more output from stderr Customization command output: Deploy error: Deployment failed. The forked off process returned error code. Package deploy failed in DeployPkg_DeployPackageFromFile ## Closing log |
You can find this log file under /var/log/vmware-imc directory. If your log contains something like that, it’s possible that you just find the resolution of your problem. My log file looked exactly like the text above and I noticed that many people with the same problem had the same log content. Sometimes you can find information about missing /usr/bin/perl directory (I found that for the Ret Hat Enterprise Linux 7 version).
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Launching deployment /usr/bin/perl -I/tmp/.vmware/linux/deploy/scripts /tmp/.vmware/linux/deploy/scripts/Customize.pl /tmp/.vmware/linux/deploy/cust.cfg. Command to exec : /usr/bin/perl Customization command output: Deploy error: Deployment failed. The forked off process returned error code. Package deploy failed in DeployPkg_DeployPackageFromFile |
And it makes sense. If you have no Perl in your environment, you cannot customize CentOS on vCloud Director, because open-vm-tools (more specifically, deployPkg) uses Perl for running the customization scripts. So the only one thing you need to do is install the Perl package with all dependencies. Just try
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# yum install perl |
or install it from the local repository/rpm package, if you have no internet access yet.
Good article about customization
If you want to read more about RHEL customization, look at this post on Jason Boche’s blog. You can find tons of useful stuff here.