Specifying Connection Settings for Building Virtual Appliances

InstallAnywhere 2013

Edition: Virtual appliance support is available in InstallAnywhere Premier Edition with Cloud Pack.

When you are defining a virtual appliance configuration in InstallAnywhere, you need to specify information such as the user name and password that should be used to connect to the machine that will be used to create the VM for your virtual appliance. You also need to specify other information that varies, depending on whether the target hypervisor is VMware vSphere or Amazon EC2.

InstallAnywhere considers this type of connection information to be credentials. InstallAnywhere does not store the credentials in the project file, but instead stores these credentials using a credential store. The credential store is encrypted and available for use in all of the InstallAnywhere projects that are accessed on the machine. That is, once you define a set of credentials in one project on a machine, those credentials are available for selection in all of the other projects that you open on the same machine.

In order for InstallAnywhere to properly retrieve the credentials at build time, the credential store must be stored in your source code control system.

To define a set of credentials to an appliance configuration:

1. In the Advanced Designer, on the Build page, click Build Appliances. The Build Appliances view opens.
2. Click the Appliance Configuration tab.
3. In the Select Appliance Configuration list, select the appliance configuration that you want to customize.
4. Click the Add New Credential button. The Add New Connection dialog box opens.
5. Configure the connection settings as needed.
6. Click OK.

InstallAnywhere adds the connection settings that you configured to the credential store, and selects this set in the Connection Settings list on the Appliance Configuration tab.

To edit an existing set of credentials:

1. In the Advanced Designer, on the Build page, click Build Appliances. The Build Appliances view opens.
2. Click the Appliance Configuration tab.
3. In the Select Appliance Configuration list, select the appliance configuration that you want to customize.
4. In the Connection Settings list, select the name of the credential set that you want to customize.
5. Click the Manage Credential button. The Manage Connection dialog box opens.
6. Configure the connection settings as needed.
7. Click OK.

InstallAnywhere updates the credential store.

See Also