7.1

Table Of Contents
Using vRealize Automation Guest Agent in Provisioning
You can install the guest agent on reference machines to further customize a machine after deployment. You
can use the reserved guest agent custom properties to perform basic customizations such as adding and
formaing disks, or you can create your own custom scripts for the guest agent to run within the guest
operating system of a provisioned machine.
After the deployment is completed and the customization specication is run (if you provided one), the
guest agent creates an XML le that contains all of the deployed machine's custom properties
c:\VRMGuestAgent\site\workitem.xml, completes any tasks assigned to it with the guest agent custom
properties, and then deletes itself from the provisioned machine.
You can write your own custom scripts for the guest agent to run on deployed machines, and use custom
properties on the machine blueprint to specify the location of those scripts and the order in which to run
them. You can also use custom properties on the machine blueprint to pass custom property values to your
scripts as parameters.
For example, you could use the guest agent to make the following customizations on deployed machines:
n
Change the IP address
n
Add or format drives
n
Run security scripts
n
Initialize another agent, for example Puppet or Chef
You can also provide an encrypted string as a custom property in a command line argument. This allows
you to store encrypted information that the guest agent can decrypt and understand as a valid command
line argument.
Your custom scripts do not have to be locally installed on the machine. As long as the provisioned machine
has network access to the script location, the guest agent can access and run the scripts. This lowers
maintenance costs because you can update your scripts without having to rebuild all of your templates.
If you choose to install the guest agent to run custom scripts on provisioned machines, your blueprints must
include the appropriate guest agent custom properties. For example, if you install the guest agent on a
template for cloning, create a custom script that changes the provisioned machine's IP address, and place the
script in a shared location, you need to include a number of custom properties in your blueprint.
Table 16. Custom Properties for Changing IP Address of a Provisioned Machine with a Guest Agent
Custom Property Description
VirtualMachine.Admin.UseGuestAgent Set to true to initialize the guest agent when the
provisioned machine is started.
VirtualMachine.Customize.WaitComplete
Set to True to prevent the provisioning workow from
sending work items to the guest agent until all
customizations are complete.
Configuring vRealize Automation
28 VMware, Inc.