vCloud Director remains a solid solution for creating lab environments. The power of the product is in the flexibility, ease of deployment of new vApps and profound options to create enhanced network configurations.
vCloud Director includes the ability to deploy pre-configured OVA/OVF virtual appliances. An OVA/OVF virtual appliance can include some custom properties which have to be set through the “Guest Properties” tab after you have deployed the virtual appliance:
For example, the vCO appliance requires to configure the initial root and vCO configuration password. If you’re deploying the vCenter Server Appliance you cannot set a password, you have to use the default which is ‘vmware’.
The silly thing is that both the configured vCO as well as the default VCSA password doesn’t seem to work when you try to log-on to the appliance. The problem is that vCloud Director has a default “auto generate password” option configured for virtual appliances. This password overwrites and sets a new default password for your appliance. The setting is available under “Guest OS Customization” -> “Password Reset”:
Try to use this password when login on to an appliance for the first time, or even better: disable the option.
Kudos to Remon Lam of virtualclouds.info for this trick.
