I've run into something that surprised me, showing my lack of knowledge about some services provided by vCenter.
Case in point, cisco has released a firewall virtual appliance (ASAv) which delivers as an OVA file.
The deployment of said OVA needs to be done using vCenter, apparently because vCenter deployment implements
some functionality (automation) that is not there when deploying directly to ESXi nor Workstation.
But what I was surprised at is that the VM has a way to interact with "leftovers" (environment) of the OVF deployment
in the form of a configuration XML file (neat, any pointers ?) and that that functionality is only available when the vCenter
is arround (i.e. live). I always thought that vCenter was primarily an infrastructure management piece, and not involved in
"end services" so to say.
Has anybody some info about how is this being done ?
Regards,
-Carlos