The operational characteristics of Windows appliances which use the Windows APK are as follow:
Page files are supported in Windows appliance. Do not enable them by default. All Windows appliance build instructions tell the user to disable the page file because swap files do slow down performance as compared to using RAM. Especially for performance-critical applications, it is better to give the appliance more memory instead of giving it a swap file.
For example, if you run a database, swapping out to disk will slow things down. A swap file simply emulates RAM using disk when enough real RAM cannot be provided. Note that even when the swap file is disabled, Windows still uses paging to free memory pages that contain unused program code -- which is the majority of the normal swapping that occurs on balanced systems. If you are running a 24x7 server-type appliance, everything that is in memory will be in use and swapping it out to disk will cause performance degradation (this is not specific to CA AppLogic).
Important: Before adding/removing terminals in your Windows appliance, please make sure that you know the Administrator password so you may login to the graphic console of the appliance. This is required in cases where manual user interaction is needed.
If new terminals or disks are added to a Windows appliance, user interaction may be needed on the next boot of the appliance. Modifications to the terminals or disks may trigger the invocation of the Windows hardware setup wizard in cases where Windows PV drivers, such as Halsign, are used.
In this case the user must login to the appliance graphical console and click-through the hardware setup wizard to enable the terminals or disks to function properly in the appliance. This may also require an appliance reboot or Windows re-activation depending upon the change. This only needs to be done once on the first boot after the modification to the appliance terminals or disks. The hardware wizard should not display on subsequent appliance boots.
This problem should only appear if new terminals/disks are added to the appliance. If the hardware wizard is encountered upon any other modification other than to the appliance terminals or disks, please contact technical support.
Note: This issue is avoidable by following the instructions in the Appliance Developer Guide.
The APK supports auto-mounting of volumes for all operating systems. This allows you to specify a path under which a particular volume displays after an appliance has booted. For example, volume myvol should be mounted under \data.
When an instance of a Windows appliance is created from a catalog class or by copying any Windows boot volume, the resulting OS has the same computer security identifier (SID) as the original. Ordinarily, this should cause no difficulty.
It should be noted that individual local accounts are assigned a SID comprised of the computer SID and an appended relative identifier. It is possible for user accounts on two different appliances to be created with the same SID if the computer SIDs are identical. This is not an issue in domain based environments where domain accounts are based on the domain SID; however, in workgroup environments security is based on local account SID.
To change the computer SID on an appliance, please use the wincfg utility supplied with CA AppLogic. This utility allows you to change various settings, such as SID, computer name, and administrator password, for your Windows appliances. In addition, this utility also updates the Cygwin environment to reflect the change in the computer SID.
Note: You cannot use the wincfg utility to change the computer SID on Windows Server 2008 based appliances.
The computer name of a Windows appliance is automatically changed by CA AppLogic whenever the appliance instance name is changed. You can change the instance name using the GUI or when a new appliance instance from a catalog is added to an application. The Windows APK that runs in all Windows appliances handles the computer name change.
On appliance start, the Windows APK compares the computer name to the appliance name. If the two names differ, the APK:
When you are starting a Windows appliance where the computer name is being updated, the appliance start process requires a few extra minutes than normal. This is due to the extra appliance reboot needed for the computer name change.
During the time the appliance is rebooting, the following message displays in the console during the app/comp start: "compname entered maintenance state" where compname is the name of the Windows component.
To prevent the APK from renaming an appliance:
Both the Windows VDS exe and Windows Filer exe create this file. The VDS computer name is specified through a property. This is not relevant for the filer the computer name. The Windows Server base class kit exe msi does not create this file.
To change the computer name of your appliance, you can either use the Windows GUI or login into your appliance and run the following command from the login shell. This assumes the APK computer name change has been disabled as described above.
Run the following command:
wmic computersystem
where name="%COMPUTERNAME%" rename name="newname"
replace newname with the computer name
Note: CA AppLogic includes the wincfg utility which allows a user to change various settings of their Windows appliances, such as computer name, and Administrator password.
If you need access to the graphical console and do not know the Administrator password, it is possible to change the password through the login shell.
Use the following command:
net user Administrator admin-new-password
where admin-new-password is the new password for the Administrator
Notes:
If this is not desired, change the password as described above.
If you wish to disable this behavior, open a Cygwin bash shell on the running appliance and edit the script /appliance/appliance.sh to insert a line exit 0 after the initial comment block.
The Windows msi installers include Cygwin, a compact Linux-like environment which runs under Windows. The Cygwin ssh server provides ssh access to Windows appliances. The login shell is bash. The Cygwin bash shell supports the majority of commands available under the Windows command shell, as well as the usual bash commands.
The cygwin shell uses / as a directory delimiter rather than \.
To access the root of a drive use, for example, cd c: or cd c:/ You can also use the cygpath utility to convert between the Cygwin POSIX style pathnames and the Windows native filenames; man cygpath for more information.
The security context in the publickey-authenticated ssh login is almost but not exactly the same as the Administrator login. The current user SID is that of Administrator but name lookup for the SID returns sshd_service instead of Administrator.
A few commands, such as diskpart, do not work from the login shell.
The Windows msi installers disable both the Windows Automatic Update Service and the Windows Firewall Service. These services can be re-enabled manually after installation if needed. For additional information, refer to Manually Perform APK Prep Script.
The Windows msi installers disable the Microsoft Windows volume auto-mounting feature. The APK auto-mounting feature supersedes this feature.
Before using the Windows Filer to operate on an NTFS volume, please read the NTFS implementation specifics in the Filer Data Sheet.
Managed windows appliances are shutdown using a shutdown event generated by the APK. On occasion, Windows can block this event if it is waiting for a user interaction, for example, in the GUI. In this case, issuing app stop or comp stop causes the appliance stop to time out in 15 minutes at which point the appliance is abruptly stopped and not gracefully shutdown.
To perform a graceful shutdown in such an event, log in to the graphic console of the appliance and shut it down through the GUI after initiating app stop or comp stop.
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