Here I will be going through the installation of vCloud Director 8.0 for Service Providers.
In addition to some additional packages which need installing, you also have to have two IP addresses configured. As per Best Practise, you should have a NIC per IP, rather than just one NIC with virtual interfaces.
In my environment my vCloud Director cells have 3 NICs, two for the HTTP and CONSOLEPROXY IPs, and one for the NFS datastore. Certain HA configurations, depending on your environment, vary of course.
The configuration of a load balancer is out of scope of this article, but I will show how to install multiple cells for a ‘clustered’ environment.
This install will be using CentOS 6.7 x64. The ISO used is the ‘Minimal’ iso. My personal ‘default’ install includes the following groups installed by YUM
- “Development Tools”
- “Development Libraries”
- “Additional Development”
You install these by using for example
yum groupinstall “Development Tools”
It certainly is not a requirement – it is just ‘me’ and my habits 🙂
There are however certain required packages which may or may not be part of these group of packages. Ensure these are installed before attempting to install vCloud Director 8 – as it will fail otherwise.
Execute the command on BOTH cells – click the following screenshots to enlarge !
Also import the public key from VMWare
Execute the command on BOTH cells
In my environment I will be using self-signed certificates. Using keytool, which is part of Linux (with Java installed) and also part of vCloud Director, create self-signed certificates for both the front-end HTTP and the console CONSOLEPROXY
Below example shows
- vcd-02
- vcd-02.vspherelab.co.uk
- 10.10.0.14
- 10.10.0.15
These details will need changing according to the server the certificate is being created on.
Execute below command to create a keystore containing both required certificates. HTTP and CONSOLEPROXY.
Do this on BOTH servers, changing the host names and IP addresses accordingly. Ensure that the keystore file certificates.ks is located in the same location on each cell. So if you create it on the first server in /home/ – ensure it is /home on the second server as well. I will explain later.
Next, create a database for vCloud Director. In my environment SQL 2014 is being used.
Create the database instance. Change folders to reflect your environment
Set the transaction isolation level
Create the database user and password
Assign the appropriate permissions to the account
Now the fun part.
Execute the command on the FIRST vCloud Director cell. First make the install file executable and then start the installation.
At the end of the command you can see the question whether the configuration script should run at the end of the installation – select ‘n’ for now.
Next we need to mount an NFS folder. When using multiple cells, an NFS folder, which is shared between each cell, is used as temporary storage for files uploaded, such as media, vApp Templates etc.
Here I assume an NFS server already exists, a share has been created and the vCD network has been allowed.
The following vCloud Director folder needs to reside on an NFS share
- /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer
Edit the fstab file.
Here you can see that I have a shared folder called NFSPool on my NAS which I have mounted as /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer
The NFS share will eventually have to be mounted on both servers, but we’ll get to that.
If you created the folder before installing vCloud Director, ensure you set the correct permissions
Now run the configuration script /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/configure
Specify the
- IP Address for the HTTP service
- IP Address for the Console Proxy IP
- Location of the previously created certificate keystore certificates.ks
- IP Address for the Syslog server (which I skip here)
- IP Address / FQDN of the database server (here SQL)
- Database Port
- Database Username
- Database Password
Then answer ‘y’ to start the FIRST vCloud Director cell.
Now you can tail / check the log file in order to follow the boot-up sequence.
To follow / tail the log file in real time, execute the following command
tail -f /opt/vmware/vcloud-director-logs/vcloud-container-info.log
Here you can see that the startup is at 4% complete
You can also check whether the mounted NFS datastore has the right permissions and therefore verifies
At some point you should see that the startup is complete
The official documentation states to continue with the additional cells before starting the configuration. However, cells can be added at any time, even days or weeks after the first cell is up and running and configured. Here I’ll configure the second cell straight away as I will be writing another article with the configuration.
As discussed previously, on your SECOND cell, you should already have created the relevant keystore certificates.ks.
Note: Ensure you copied it into the exact location at the time you configured your FIRST server. So if certificates.ks was located in /home at the time of configuration of the first cell, ensure the newly created file on the second cell is also located in /home
Now copy the response.properties file form the first cell to the second cell. This file contains the location of the keystore certificates.ks and also the SQL information such as IP, DB, login etc.
Note: Just like vCloud Director 5.5 – the documentation states to run the installation file on additional cells with the -r key to specify the above response file. In vCloud Director 5.5 – and according to the vCloud Director 8 documentation, the installer will then start the configuration automatically, using the response file to automatically configure certificates and database details. HOWEVER, when I wrote this article, I noticed that the configuration does NOT start automatically.
Here you can see that I executed the installation binary specifying the response file (as per official documentation). But it does NOT start the configuration automatically. I therefore specify ‘n‘ when it asks to run the configuration script.
I now start the configuration script specifying the response file – as this is what the installation script should have done automatically. Do NOT start the server once done. We still need to configure the shared NFS transfer folder. Here you can see when you specify the response file, it will only require you to select the appropriate IP addresses for both HTTP and CONSOLEPROXY
Mount the NFS transfer folder as you have done on your first cell by editing the /etc/fstab and then mount.
Now you can start the second cell and just like you have seen on the first cell, follow the log file to ensure the cell comes up cleanly.
Note: As mentioned, this article does not include the configuration of a load balancer. It solely depends what load balancer you have in your environment. This will effectively also determine how you configure the certificates. For example, if you were to use signed certificates but don’t terminate SSL on the load balancer (for the VIP), then you’d have to include the FQDNs and IPs in your keystore. In my setup here, I’d have to terminate SSL for the VIP on the load balancer, as my keystores here only include the FQDN and IPs of the individual cell.
That’s it. vCloud Director 8 SP is now installed. Next, the configuration, followed by a test.