An enterprise size company should require enterprise level software to meet the demands of it’s infrastructure and user community. Software vendors offer enterprise class applications and solutions, however, miss the mark when deploying agents to clients. A case may be made with VMWare’s offering of vCenter Hyperic.

VMware vCenter Hyperic monitors operating systems and applications that are running on  physical, virtual and cloud environments. The server is a straightforward install. It is the installation of the Hyperic HQ Agent on the client that can unnecessarily be time-consuming. Consider an environment of five servers, where the manual installation of the client would be somewhat acceptable. Consider, however, an environment of 100s of servers. A manual installation procedure is unacceptable.

The Hyperic HQ Agent installation is two-fold. Download and install the Hyperic HQ Agent, which requires user intervention to accept the terms of agreement, to press “2” to install the Hyperic HQ Agent, and to enter an installation directory. There is no supported method of automating this task. The end-user of this install is the System Administrator, the one who likely installed and is maintaining the Hyperic server. The one whom likely read the terms of agreement for the Hyperic server and now seemingly required to re-read it for 100s of agent installs. This is an enterprise level agent, it should be automated.  It can be. While there is no officially supported method for any level of automation, here are tidbits and hints that should be useful in your bash script to automate the install.

• Look for the setup.xml file that may be found in ../../hyperic-hqee-installer-5.0.0/installer/data directory and edit accordingly.
• Create a setup.properties file with the path of the installation. The content of the file should look something like this: hyperic-hq-agent.installdir=/opt/hyperic
• Run the setup as the user hyperic (this should have already been documented) using the setup.properties file for the destination and echoing 2 to install the Hyperic HQ Agent without the prompt: echo 2 | ./setup.sh setup.properties
• Done

The second part is to configure and start the Hyperic HQ Agent. To automate this task, edit the agent.properites file that may be found in the ../../hyperic/agent-5.0.0-EE/conf directory. Uncomment some values and replace the values for the following with those suitable for your environment.

• camIP=localhost to camIP=my.domain.name
• uncomment agent.setup.camIP
• uncomment agent.setup.camSSLPort
• uncomment agent.setup.camSecure
• uncomment agent.setup.camLogin
• camPword= to camPword=youpasswordhere
• uncomment agent.setup.camPword
• uncomment agent.setup.agentIP
• uncomment agent.setup.agentPort
• acceptUnverifiedCertificate=no to acceptUnverifiedCertificate=yes
• uncomment agent.setup.acceptUnverifiedCertificate
• uncomment agent.setup.unidirectional

Unlike the setup.properties file described for the installation, the agent.properties file should retain the name agent.properties for it to be automatically recognized by the hq-agent.sh script. Once the agent.properties file is created run the hq-agent script with the start option from ../../hyperic/agent-5.0.0-EE/bin like so ./hq-agent.sh start

With the modifications outlined here, an all-in-one install script is not far from completion.  Just add some firewall exceptions to the script and it should be good to go.