First a note of caution: When creating a Provider vDC it will push the vCloud agent to all hosts participating in the vCloud cluster. This will cause all hosts to go into maintenance mode at once. It also seem to violate the HA admission control. I am not sure if that is by design or a bug to be honest, but I noticed this since early days (1.5+).
Imagine you put all hosts in a production cluster into maintenance mode at the same time – this can’t end well so make sure you don’t use your production cluster when implementing vCloud Director 🙂
You should use a separate cluster anyway, but if you DO need to do this, you may have to cheat a bit.
I will come to this a bit later.
First, create a resource pool in the cluster you want to dedicate to vCloud Director
I simply called it vCloud Director
Next, Storage Policies. If you don’t have any Storage Policies configured, vCloud Director will take every LUN available and puts it into an Any profile / policy. What that means is that every single LUN, including the ones you may have dedicated to ISOs, Templates, Fast or Slow, will be available for virtual machines.
You obviously need to avoid that. You can find my article in how to create Storage Policies HERE.
Now we have our Resource Pool and Storage Policy defined, let’s go ahead and click Create a Provider VDC
Give it a name and decide what VM Version you want to allow. IF for some reason you need to be able to edit virtual machines outside of vCloud Director byusing the old-school C# client, select as highest version “9”. VM Version 10 VMs cannot be modified using the C# client but require the Web Client.
Click Next
Select your newly created Resource Pool and click Next
Select your Storage Policy created for the vCloud Director infrastructure and click Next.Here you can also see that the *ANY Prolicy includes my vSAN and NFS datastore but my created Policy only my vSAN datastore.
If you do not see your newly created Policy, cancel this, go to Manage & Monitor > vCenters
Right click your vCenter and select Refresh Storage Policies
Give it a few minutes and then go back to your Provider VDC creation.
Now the Cheat I mentioned at the beginning. Here you can see you need to enter the credentials of all your hosts. If your cluster has VMs running, you need to avoid that all hosts going into maintenance mode at the same time. Only way I found to avoid this would be by entering a password for each individual host and deliberately putting a wrong password into the fields of the hosts you don’t want to go into maintenance mode straight away.
The Provider VDC will still be created, but some hosts will obviously have their agent missing, this can be done at a later time.
Here however I don’t have any running VMs on the cluster so I enter my correct password for all the hosts and click Next
Click Finish at the overview
You should now see that your hosts going into maintenance mode and an agent is being installed.
If you have typed in a wrong password, or like in my case I got a vSAN cluster with only three hosts (and you cannot put all three hosts into maintenance mode at the same time), you simply prepare each host individually later.
So under Manage& Monitor > Hosts, right click the host and select Prepare Host
Type in your login details and click OK.
It will now install the agent on that host
Do this for each host until you are done.
Installation of vCD 5.5 content
1. Installation
2. vShield Manager
3. VXLAN Config
4. Initial vCD Config
5. Create a Provider vDC
6. External Network
7. Create an Organization vDC
8. vShield Edge / Org Network
9. Final Testing
10. Install a second vCloud Cell