BOSH deployments using Xenial Stemcell sometimes have the wrong hostname using VM CID

Products

• Operations Manager

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
Upon VM creation, the BOSH agent set the VM hostname to be equal to the ID of the BOSH agent. Some tiles such as PCC (Pivotal Cloud Cache) rely on the hostname of the VM to be the ID of the BOSH agent.

In GCP environments, the hostname can be change to be the VM CID using the command, vm-GUID. This results in services failing to resolve certain BOSH deployed hostnames. 

This problem may also impact Syslog forwarding, given the hostname of the VM can change after a deployment. This impacts certain reporting actions in the external remote Syslog application.

Environment

Cause

This is a race condition between the BOSH agent and GCP. The older Stemcells contain a configuration, which allows GCP to change the hostname upon VM creation, and there is a race between the BOSH agent and GCP to modify this hostname.

Resolution

This problem is resolved by BOSH Xenial Stemcell version 97.41 and 170.13.