I recently did a blog post on how to get vRops running in vCloud Air, see here. At the same time I have been using Ravello Systems cloud platform (free for vExperts) to run a vSphere 6 environment. Have been trying to run vRops before on Ravello before, but ran into an error message and due to the limited time I have to play/learn I skipped finding the cause. Luckily I found some time and revisit this error message.

The error comes when ever I try to upload the OVF(an extracted OVA).  The error message says:

An error occurred: You attempted to upload a vmdk file with a geometry which is not supported. Please contact support.

 

So I contacted Ravello support and got the following message back:

Hello Michael,

The issue involves disk geometry, a concept dealing with the virtualized hardware of the disk, namely the number of cylinders, heads and sectors.
Ravello infrastructure currently supports running only VMs containing VMDKs with 63 sectors.

We are going to solve this issues in one of our coming releases. For the meanwhile as a workaround you can try and import it to ESXI and then import to Ravello directly (using option 1 in the import tool) from ESXi.

 

 

The presented solution wasn’t an option for me. But changing the sectors how hard could that be ? As it turns out it was some what hard to do, on Windows at least. See my blog post here on How to change VMDK geometry.

After changing the VMDKs as descripted in the blog post above, the OVF uploaded succesfully. I deployed it to an “Application” and was now ready to start vRops on Ravello.

 

Ravello doesn’t support the typical ovf properties. So you can’t define the properties, such as ip address, before booting the vRops appliance. But at the same time vRops doesn’t like changes too much. So the safe way to get vRops up and running, is to set the network settings to DHCP. (If you really want to change IP have a look at this blog post)

Note: setting “Reserved IP” or “static IP” doesn’t work.

 

Click “Update”, and wait for the vRops to be deployed and powered on.

Once vRops is powered on. Click the console bottom. At some point you will see the above screen – This will happen every time the vRops appliance is rebooted. There is a quick fix for this, once booted run the following command

mv /etc/init.d/boot.compliance /etc/

This moves the boot.comliance file and the script is not executed on boot – I move it “just in case”, but if you prefer it should be safe to delete it.

To continue to install, all you have to do is press “any key”, to get vRops to boot.

By the way you might see some syntax error on the console – They seems to be harmless and releated to the fact that the hypervisor is not “vmware”.

Now the vRops appliance will boot, get an IP from DHCP and then the vRops services will be installed and set up (with the DHCP given IP). Next time vRops is rebooted it might get a new IP address and as I wrote earliere vRops doesn’t like that at all. The solution is to configure a static IP address on the vRops appliance.

First change directory to “/opt/vmware/share/vami” and then type “./vami_config_net” to configure the network settings.

In the menu choose option “6” and then type “y” and “n”, the rest should be correct. Lastly verify the settings are correct. By the way do not change the IP address from what the DHCP server provided, as it will not work. All we are doing here is making sure vRops can’t change IP address, as this will break your vRops appliance.

Now choose option “4”, defind the DNS server(s)

Next choose option “3” and set up the hostname

Lastly you can verify that settings are correct by choosing option “0”. When done type “1”, to exit. Next reboot the appliance and verify it boots again and the IP address is correct.

 

Hopefully when you enter the IP address of vRops into a browser you will get greeted by the below screenshot. Now it’s just the regular vRops setup you need to follow.

 

Hope this will be help full. I know Ravello as a great way to run a home lab in the cloud.