VPP Unusable

[danny33c]

Is anyone else having an issue with VPP where it is basically unusable? Purchased licenses on existing apps are not showing up and when we hit save with any change the VPP Assignments the browser tab indicator spins and then times out. JAMF has said this is an issue that will be fixed in the 9.4 release, but just putting it out there to see if anyone else is experiencing this.

Thanks

[adamcodega]

Yes, at this point I'm waiting until 9.4 before buying anything else through VPP. I tried re-uploading my token and it wasn't until Tomcat was restarted that VPP started pulling in purchased apps again.

For what it's worth, you can "purchase" free apps and distribute them through VPP so it's a simple way to test if JAMF-VPP-Apple are working or not.

[Malcolm]

I've been playing around with this and from what I have found with Jamf Support team is, that vpp is not checking proxy before attempting to go to the web. As a work around we bought a 4G wifi adapter, and sent all web access proxyless via the 4g connection. (not best practice).

Did have a few issues with tomcat communicating with vpp, where it also wasn't obtaining all of our licence purchases.

After a reinstalling the vpp token (revoking all distributed apps first), and a few restarts of tomcat, it eventually downloaded all of the licences and accurately enrolled our invited test accounts / users.

I'm hesitant to enrol the invite all 700+ users yet and conducting further testing before doing so. And would recommend the same.

One trick with vpp I think will work great for us being a Prep to 9 school is, if we purchase free licences, when distributed to the users, it would appear itunes wont require sign-in regularly allowing us to push out the app without the end user putting in their password. (well that's my end goal with VPP - cause then parents wont be required to install the app of which they are failing to do).

[adamcodega]

I run a the JAMF hosted version, and am having the same problems, so it's not something related to the user's network necessarily. I was told it's under the development bug D-007194, with a fix planned for 9.4

[flammable]

We're having the same issue, too. Restarting Tomcat allowed all of the apps I purchased yesterday to show up, and revoked the apps I had revoked yesterday.

Our JSS is running 9.32 on Windows Server 2008 r2.

[tlewsadder]

We are in the same boat. We have been dealing with VPP issues for a good two weeks. It started out with the same situation danny33c is having with lags when saving. Those started at 10-20 seconds two weeks ago and eventually grew to 3-4 minutes. We also are seeing the same issues with apps purchased not showing up. Restarting tomcat solves this for us.

We have informed the JAMF team and have pursued this issue with Apple as well. We have been just dealing with it thinking it might be on our end. We have 400 devices that we need to redistribute to teachers asap, unless 9.4 is coming out tomorrow I don't think we can wait.

[bbardenhagen]

We are experiencing up to two hours of lag when saving. Our support person at JAMF says that this is top priority and I am working closely with them daily to find a permanent fix or temporary work around since it is critical that this feature function for us for the upcoming school year.

[seankaiser]

Add me to the list of folks having problems with VPP assignments taking forever to save (or delete.) We started configuring our 800+ new iPads about 3 weeks ago, and things were going pretty well for the first couple of weeks. Then last week, rather suddenly, things got very slow when waiting for the assignment invitation to appear on the iPads. (Initially I thought this was because I was having our techs click Resend on the VPP invitation for each batch of iPads they set up, but after working with support, and clearing out the invalid invitations out of the usage table and not seeing any improvement, I'm not so sure that is/was the real cause.)

Anyway, I've been working with Travis Keinholz on this for the past couple of days, and he's had me do quite a bit of performance tuning to our JSS and MySQL servers (they had never been bumped from the initial/lean configuration we used 2 years ago when we had 150 iPads in the system, now we have nearly 1700) with no appreciable impact (at least as far as this issue is concerned.)

Tonight, I created a new test vpp assignment with one app and scoped it out to an LDAP user group with a fairly small number of users in it, and then queried the database to see if the assignment appeared, which it sort of did. After a delay (at least 30 minutes, probably less than an hour), the assignment showed up in the VPP assignments list in JSS, and MySQL showed 5 users with the app assigned (whereas it showed 0 during the "lag".)

I'm glad to find this thread and that we're not alone. I've shared the link with Travis so maybe the various support folks that are working with all of us can consolidate their notes and hopefully JAMF can get things resolved for us.

[adamcodega]

In the release notes for 9.4 you'll see the bug [D-007194] has been marked as fixed so looks like this issue has been resolved. VPP purchases are coming up very quickly for me now. By the way, you can test VPP by purchasing free apps through the VPP portal.

[danny33c]

Even after the 9.4 update I'm still experiencing delay of over four minutes (04:04.93 minutes to be precise) to change the scope of one app. I simply added an AD group to the Limitations tab. I'm told it's because the JSS is downloading the entire app catalog every time and calculating licenses. We have 147 assignments, and over 9400 licenses for the apps. Does anyone else have this many assignments/licenses and NOT experience a lag when scoping the assignments?

[flammable]

I just verified we still have this problem, too. We waited about 5 minutes after purchasing the app to restart Tomcat, but it showed up immediately afterwards. Same with revoking apps. We only have 6 different apps in our 4 different VPP Assignments.

[Olson]

I also could not distribute VPP invites to users until I turned on "Allow installing configuration profiles (Supervised devices only)" in my Restrictions payload. I wasn't sure what the significance of this item was, so I did not select it when I first set up the profile. I don't recall reading anything about this being necessary for VPP invites.

Once that was sorted out,I did my first distribution of a set of 44 apps to an user, things were looking ok, but the downloads stopped after the 24th app. Where are the other 20? Is there a way to jumpstart Casper to finish the downloads?

[danny33c]

Olsen - It's possible that the AppStore timed out after 15 minutes. Go to the AppStore and search one of the missing apps you pushed to the iPad. You should see the iCloud icon next to the app, download it. It may prompt the downloading of the other apps. But worst case you can find the app in the AppStore and hit the cloud on each one.

[flammable]

Clarification: on 9.4, it takes 5-10 minutes for the VPP apps to show up in the JSS, but it works. I can't give others server-level access to restart Tomcat, but I can live with this. Given that everything else is instantaneous, it'd be nice if this were too.

[jbrucato]

Does anyone know if the slowness with scoping is fixed in 9.4? We're in the middle of a large iPad rollout and when I try to scope groups in VPP assignments it takes a VERY long time. So long, however that I'm not sure at this point. I increased my Tomcat session to 10 hours to see if there is a time. Any input would be greatly appreciated!

[danny33c]

It is not fixed in 9.4 - it takes 4-5 minutes, and sometimes a lot longer to for the Save to finish.

[danny33c]

We are updating to 9.5 today and hoping it helps. Anyone on 9.5 and still experiencing long Save times in Assignments?

[neilatosi]

Also having the same issue. Currently on 9.4. Upgrading to 9.51 now and hoping that it will make a difference. Will post my results!

[bfrench]

We upgraded today and so far vpp assignments are going through much faster. Although after it saves the change a bar with "Recalculation pending" appears at the top of the screen. Not quite sure what that means .

[jbrucato]

We upgraded to 9.5 and most of our issues are resolved with saving. VPP assignments seem to be more reliable as well. As bfrench said, if it's a large change, it will save and say "recalculating changes".

[nelsonpark]

v9.52 was just released (as in right now!)
it includes a fix (hopefully) for VPP not correctly using proxy servers which can lead to failed VPP assignments, etc. this would only be a problem if using a proxy server though
Conor

[jfitzpatrick]

@nocor Fix seemed to work for a little while. Connection from JSS to Apple VPP seems to be down for us again

[nelsonpark]

@jfitzpatrick have you since updated to v9.61?
running atleast version 9.6 along with an SQL command to manually enter the proxy details correctly added the proxy settings allowed the software to contact the VPP server without issue. you may need to contact your casper rep to get access to the correct instructions as if its a slightly different cause then adding the commands may cause more problems
Conor