BMC CLM 2.1 SP1 Installation – Install Planner RSCD AutoLic

In this series, we are going to cover many of the items of importance to deploy BMC Software’s Cloud Lifecycle Management.  This is a great solution that we have been deeply involved in customer engagements to provide Private/Public Cloud offering. This article focuses on release 2.1 SP1.

We are not going to cover the step by step installation (this is pretty well documented in BMC’s documentation under docs.bmc.com (valid account required), but instead some of the snags. Good start point is here and also the installation end to end overview here.

Part of the CLM Install Planner activity is to deploy BBSA Remote System Call Daemon (RSCD) agents to all of the hosts that is part of the CLM Infrastructure.  The RSCD Agent is used as a conduit to deploy the different components of CLM (AR Enterprise, Cloud AR, BBSA, BBNA, BAO, etc).  In this example, we are using a POC Architecture (see image).

 

So let’s jump right into the Install Planner RSCD Auto Licensing feature.  By default, the planner will attempt to connect to the BMC Bladelogic licensing site where it will attempt to automatically license the RSCD agent.  Two problems there:

1. Most deployments of CLM are in private networks (usually government agencies) where no internet connection exists
2. There is a bug where it configures the RSCD configuration files (covered here in more detail) with an impersonated account that does not exist on the local system.

Let’s cover how to deal with issue #2.  If you get this error in the Install Planner phase where it pushes and licenses the RSCD agent to the rest of the CLM infrastructure components (after you entered valid BMC Bladelogic licensing credentials), we’ll show you how to fix it.

 

 

First to understand why it failed the licensing, you need to look at the Install Planner’s logfile usually located under the %TEMP% directory of the Install Planner platform. In our case, this is under C:\Users\Administrator.CLM\ AppData\Local\Temp\1\ planner_install_log.txt.

The relevant errors on the Installation Planner logfile shows up as this:

FAILED: Login not allowed for user

The reason for this error is because the Installation Planner cannot access the RSCD Agent.  You can confirm this by also looking at the RSCD.log logfile on the target machine (usually under C:\Program Files\BMC Software\BladeLogic\RSCD directory).  You will notice that the RSCD Agent was unable to map the incoming request to an impersonation user “clminstall”.   

The reason for this is because that account was never created to start with on the target example system POC-BAO, but the RSCD agent is configured with such impersonation:

 

So to fix this, create the user locally on each CLM infrastructure server:

net user clminstall <password> /add
net localgroup administrators clminstall /add

and then re-run the install planner phase that deploys and licenses the RSCD agent (just hit the “Previous” button, re-enter your Bladelogic Licensing site credentials, and press “Next” again). You will be taken to the next step on the CLM installation!

 

Lesson learned: If CLM Install Planner goes wrong, there are two highly valuable sources of debug information:

1. The CLM Install Planner log file
2. The RSCD Agent log files

Now, is this a bug? Potentially (or maybe we overlooked an install step to create the clminstall user).  I’ve posted it here to get feedback, but with SP2 on the near term horizon, maybe this (and various other quirky issues) will be fixed.

All copyrights are held by their respective owners.  CLM and Bladelogic is a registered trademark and copyrighted by BMC Software.  This blog post does not claim ownership or intellectual property of CLM or any of its components.  To contact the author, please email me.