VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0.1 Deployment Series-Part1

-

Hello Everyone,

Today, I am covering about the VMware Cloud Foundation deployment series. It will be a long series as well.

VMware Cloud Foundation aka VCF, is an integrated soultion stack which bundles with VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX and Monitoring and Logging solutions like vROPS and vRLI.

VCF is a Hybrid cloud platfrom which can integrate with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP etc.

Once the VCF is UP then we can deploy other solutions like VMware Tanzu Grid, Horizon View, vRealize Automation as well as a VI Workload Domains.

There are 2 types of VCF Architecture i.e Standard and Consolidated.

In Standard architecture, we have a first domain i.e called Management Domain which contains all the management components servers like vCenter, NSX Manager, vROPS, vRLI. In this domain, we should have 4 ESXi nodes with vSAN as a storage. Management domain can run with vSAN only.

For VI Workload domain, it can accept vSAN as well as other storage like FC, NFS etc.

Once, we have Management Domain UP and running then we can deploy the VI workload domain.

In Consolidated architecture, it is mainly used and deployed for testing or POC kind of environment where we have six or less ESXi nodes. In this architecture, Management and VI workload domain runs in a single cluster and isolation can be achieved via resource pools only.

You can follow below VMware docs for VCF to understand it more.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/4.0.1/rn/VMware-Cloud-Foundation-401-Release-Notes.html

Now, we are going to start the VCF platform deployment and will go with Consolidated Architecture as I have 4 ESXi nodes only with one Cache and Capacity drives (All flash).

For Each and Every VCF version, there is a Cloud Foundation bill of Materials which tells you about the components version are supported with this VCF version.

So, we are going to deploy the VCF 4.0.1 version and below components versions are supported with this.

 

To Deploy the VCF environment, we need to use Cloud Builder appliance provided by VMware.

VMware Automated the deployment process via this cloud builder appliance. we need to install/prepare the ESXi nodes only with above listed ESXi version. Rest components like vCenter, NSX, vSAN, vROPS, vRLI will be deployed by Cloud builder appliance itself. 

we don't need to deploy these components manually.

So, i have already installed ESXi 7.0b version on all my 4 ESXi nodes, configure the IP address, DNS, NTP etc.

Now, we have to download this cloud builder applaince as per the above version listed from VMware site and deploy it as a OVF.

I have download and deployed the Cloud Builder appliance on my another vSphere environment. we can access it via FQDN or IP address. We need to make sure that this appliance should be reachable to ESXi hosts network otherwise we can not deploy the VCF environment.

So, that's it for this Part-1, we will start with Cloud Builder in our next Part-2.

Cheers..








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to migrate the N-VDS as the host switch to VDS 7.0 in NSX-T 3.x

-
Image
  Hello There, In this article, i am covering how to migrate the ESXi host switch from N-VDS to VDS 7.0 switch in NSX-T 3.2.x version. When using N-VDS as the host switch,  NSX-T  is represented as an opaque network in  vCenter Server . N-VDS owns one or more of the physical interfaces (pNICs) on the transport node, and port configuration is performed from  NSX-T Data Center . You can migrate your host switch to  vSphere  Distributed Switch (VDS) 7.0 for optimal pNIC usage and manage the networking for  NSX-T  hosts from  vCenter Server . When running  NSX-T  on a VDS switch, a segment is represented as an  NSX-T  Distributed Virtual Port Groups. Any changes to the segments on the  NSX-T  network are synchronized in  vCenter Server. We have an NSX-T environment running with NSX-T 3.2.2.1 version. this environment was designed and implemented with NSX-T 2.x version and that time we used the N-VDS as host switch configuration on the transport nodes bcuz VDS was not supported that time. 
Read more

vROPS appliances password remediation tasks failed from SDDC manager

-
Image
Issue details:-   Password remediation tasks on SDDC manager getting failed with below error. However, we are able to connect SSH with root password on the vROPS appliances, no issues with credentials. I checked Operations logs on SDDC manager and found below logs, indicating the SSH connectivity issues from SDDC to vROPS appliances. Tried to do SSH vROPS appliance from SDDC manager, getting below error... Seems some issue with ECDSA key.. Resolution:- SSH to vROPS appliance and retrieve the ECDSA ssh keys as below. Now, we have 2 options to update the correct SSH keys for vROPS appliance on SDDC manager known_Hosts files located at below location.   /root/.ssh/known_hosts   /etc/vmware/vcf/commonsvcs/known_hosts   /home/vcf/.ssh/known_hosts   /opt/vmware/vcf/commonsvcs/defaults/hosts/known_hosts First option is manually copy and paste the SSH key on all the known_hosts files and restart the SDDC manager services and then try to remediate the password again. it will be successful this
Read more

How to Import/Register a VM into vRA portal

-
Image
You can import an unmanaged virtual machine to a vRealize Automation environment. An unmanaged virtual machine exists in a vCenter but is not managed in a vRealize Automation environment and cannot be viewed in the vRA portal . Once you import an unmanaged virtual machine, the virtual machine is managed by using the vRealize Automation management interface. you can see the virtual machine on the Managed Machines tab or the Items tab. Please follow below steps to Import/Register VM into a vRA portal. Log in to vRealize Automation as a fabric administrator and as a business group manager. If you are importing virtual machines that use static IP addresses, prepare a properly configured address pool.  If you use bulk import to import a virtual machine with a static IP address that is allocated to another virtual machine, the import fails. Create a Blueprint and should not have even network attached as well. See below snapin. Create Network profile that shoul
Read more