We now have NSX 6.2 and vCloud Director 8.0 for Service Provider installed and configured. Time to tie it all together and configure the solution.
The first time you connect to your vCloud Director cell, it will start the configuration wizard.
Accept the License Agreement
Enter your product key
Create an administrator, give it a password, full name and email address
If you got multiple vCloud Director instances (not cells), make sure you use a different name / ID for each instance.
Confirm the entered details.
You will then be redirected to the login page. Login here with your administrator configured in the previous steps
First thing you will see is basically a list of initial steps to perform. Each step with a grey checkmark should be completed.
Let’s ignore all that for a second. Here I want to check something first and perform one configuration before starting to attach a vCenter.
Here I just want to check that both cells are available. We haven’t attached a vCenter yet – which is why you receive error about the missing vCenter Proxy Service.
I’d like to use the vCenter Lookup Service. Jump to Federation and enter the vSphere Lookup Service URL
Please note the port number ! As of vSphere 6 – the Lookup Port has changed form :7444 to ;443 and I am using vSphere 6 here.
Lookup Service should now be registered.
Now click Home again to go back to the initial ‘To-Do’ list. Click Attach a vCenter
Enter here the vCenter details. Under vSphere Web Client URL select Use vSphere Services. This is why we configured the Lookup Service beforehand so vCloud Director can get it itself 🙂
If you followed my series then you will have NSX in your environment. Enter here the details of your NSX Manager. If you do not use NSX, enter here your vShield Manager details.
Confirm the details.
You can then check that the vCenter has connected successfully.
Now you can also see that a cell has been configured as vCenter Proxy.
Go back to Home and click Create a Provider vDC
Give it a name and select the highest supported (virtual) hardware version.
Select the right resource pool. vCloud Director should use a dedicated resource cluster. If you did not create a resource pool, the root of the cluster will be dedicated to vCloud Director. Avoid having multiple resource pool in addition to vCloud Director – you will get quickly into issues, such as resource contention etc.
By default vCloud Director will put every single datastore into an *Any storage policy. Here you can see that I have a LUN to my Synology mounted but also local storage. vCloud Director will just assume I want to use either LUN for my workloads, which is obviously not ideal, as different LUNs potentially have different characteristics.
Here you can see I have configured a Storage Policy in my vCenter called SSD Storage Policy which only includes my Synology LUN and none of the local datastores.
Enter the credentials of your hosts. Thankfully as of vCloud Director 5.6.x, hosts don’t seem to need to into maintenance mode. Which could be a problem if your hosts serve other workloads than vCloud Director. It used to throw every host into maintenance mode – at the same time 🙂
Confirm the details.
Here you can see that the hosts have been prepared for vCloud Director and the resources are ready to be used.
When you create a Provider vDC, a VXLAN network pool is automatically being created. If you haven’t configured VXLAN in either NSX or vShield yet, this network pool will have an error. You could create a different kind of network pool if your environment doesn’t support VXLANs. If it does however, configure VXLAN in your NSX or vShield Manager and the error will disappear.
Now select Create an external network
Select the appropriate network / vlan. Here you can see that I got an external network called cunningly External. Which I will select.
Now configure the external network (gateway / subnet mask / dns etc.)
Here I configure the gateway, netmask and dns of my external network (which is technically an internal IP range, but I NAT it to the outside world externally).
Dedicate an IP pool. The Static IP Pool is being used when you deploy a vApp from a template. During the customisation phase an IP will be taken from the pool and assigned to the individual VMs. If you install VMs from scratch within vCloud Director, it would still assign an IP from the Pool (assuming you select the pool as IP source, rather than DHCP), but you’ll need to configure the IPs manually or / and install VMware Tools. Once VMware Tools have been installed, vCloud Director is able to assign current or new IP to the server.
Check the configured details.
Give it a name and description
And confirm the details
That’s the basic provider installation done. As you can see below, the ‘only’ tasks left are oganization / customer specific.
This concludes the standard provider configuration. In the next article I will show how to create an organization, upload some files and create VMs in order to then perform some testing (e.g. network).