Find the right JRE filename when installing vRA Application Services Agent
As I said in a previous post, these days I’m more focused on cloud automation and orchestration than virtualizing business critical apps like I have been in the past. However, combining those two worlds is of interest to me so I’ve been playing with vRealize Automation Application Services.
I was recently preparing a Windows Server 2012 R2 template to be used as a template for vRA/Application Services and so I was following VMware’s documentation on how to install the required agents. Unfortunately, VMware’s documentation needs to be updated to reflect the changes that come with each new version of Application Services.
One of the required components to prepare a Windows VM for Application Services is the proper Java SE 7 Runtime Environment from the vRA Application Services appliance. The VMware documentation for the version of vRA Application Services that I’m running, 6.2, indicates that I should go to the following URL to download the right JRE version:
Download and install the supported Java SE 7 Runtime Environment from http://Application_Director_IP/agent/jre-1.7.0_51-win64.zip.
The bolded piece is the important part. When I tried to go to that URL on my vRA Application Services appliance, I got a 404 error. The challenge here is that the version of JRE changes with each update but the documentation unfortunately has not. In order to find the proper JRE version, you can simply SSH to the vRA Application Services appliance and look.
Thanks to @grantorchard for the tip here!
1) SSH into the appliance as darwin_user, and then su to root.
2) Run ls -l /home/darwin/tcserver/darwin/webapps/darwin/agent/
3) Find the appropriate JRE version. As you can see in the screenshot below, in vRA 6.2.0 the appropriate filename is jre-1.7.0_72-win64.zip for the Windows agent and not jre-1.7.0_51-win64.zip as the documentation states.
Hope this quick tip saves you some headaches when trying to install the vRA Application Services agent!