vCloud Director 9.5 is VMware’s first attempt at an appliance for vCloud Director. It’s built upon VMware’s Photon OS 2.0. The appliance does a couple great things. It’s provided as an Linux appliance pre-configured with all the required dependencies for vCloud Director and installs the vCD binaries. It also comes as an OVA deployment allowing you to easily enter all the required parameters to simplify the deployment.
Unfortunately the appliance isn’t perfect and has a few bugs in it. The first of which you’ll come across very soon after deployment when you attempt to set the timezone from the console.
When you open the console for the first time you’ll see a familiar looking console menu where you can login or Set Timezone. When you attempt to set the timezone you will see an error briefly flash up on the screen then be taken back to the console menu.
/usr/bin/tzselect: line 180 /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone1970.tab No such file or directory
/usr/bin/tzselect time zone files not setup correctly
There is no obvious way to correct this issue until a patch is released. The timezone, though, can still be set via the CLI with the following steps.
Login to the CLI and type in
ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/
Find your nearest region and perform another ls on that folder. If your region doesn’t exist you can perform an ls on Etc to select a specific GMT zone.
In my example I choose Australia.
ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/
Inside this directory find your nearest State or City.
Use the VAMI set timezone command to set this region. For example
root@vcd01l [ ~ ]# /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_timezone_cmd Australia/Melbourne
Timezone settings updated
Exit out of the CLI to return to the console menu. Your timezone should now be set.
