It seems that a Lab Setup Guide is missing here.
I would like to share my findings here, and a question as well.
I am using my testing lab systems. No vCloud Director here. Just using vCenter for cloning operations and a bunch of ESXi hosts.
From my testing on previous vRA 7.0 and 7.3, I came to the conclusion that the vRA Management Agent running in the IaaS windows server is tied to the MAC address.
Meaning that if the Lab vApp is cloned, the IaaS will not be available from the point of view of the vRA appliance.
For that the solution is easy: Just change the VM MAC address to static (set to Manual in the vCenter client GUI).
Now in version 7.6, my tests reveals that the vRA Management Agent in the IaaS server also validates the IaaS VM SMBIOS UUID value.
Meaning that a cloned vApp will not have the IaaS services available for the vRA appliance.
I confirmed this behavior by checking the SMBIOS UUID in the uuid.bios parameter on the VM VMX files.
The cloned IaaS Vm will have a different UUID as expected when using vCenter as the cloning helper.
After cloning the vApp, and BEFORE powering ON the cloned IaaS VM, manually changing the uuid.bios value of the cloned IaaS VM to be the same as the original IaaS used for the installation, will result in a fully working IaaS and vRA systems.
I know that vCloud Director have the ability to retain the MAC address and UUID on the cloned VMs.
On the other hand, vCenter will make sure the cloned Vms will have unique UUID, breaking the IaaS service.
Changing the VM to be cloned with uuid.action = "keep" and uuid.bios "<value>" in the VM VMX file will not help in this case. I tested this on several occasions and on different vCenter versions, namely versions 6.5 and 6.7U2.
One possible solution would be to change the uuid.bios of the cloned Vms. I tested this option with success, by manually editing the VM VMX files, but this method would required building a script for full automation.
Now my question would be:
How can we retain the UUID during vCenter cloning operations, like the vCloud Director is able to do?