Deploy

Disclaimer! I am learning NSX-T, part of my learning is to deploy in my lab - if I contradict the official docs then go with the docs!

Lab Environment

This NSX-T lab environment is built as a nested lab on my physical hosts. There are four physical ESXi hosts, onto which I will deploy three ESXi VMs, a vCenter Server Appliance, NSX Manager, an NSX Controller cluster, and two NSX Edge Nodes.

Greetings from Day 1 of VMworld US 2016!

Every year I try and make use of the VMworld discount at the exam centre, and this year was no exception I sat the VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam, and results are still pending! Overall it’s a good exam, there was very little of the spelling and grammatical errors I’ve complained about in the past, performance was OK and the level of difficulty was good.

With the release of vCAC 6.1 there have been some great improvements in the setup of the clustered vCAC appliances - none of the previous copying of configuration files between appliances - just a simple wizard to do it all for you. In my opinion this is superb.

You’ll need to have deployed a load balancer of some sort - vCAC 6.0 build-out to distributed model – Part 3.1: Configure Load Balancing with vCNS or vCAC 6.0 build-out to distributed model – Part 3.2: Configure load balancing with NSX

SSO is a fundamental requirement when deploying vCAC, whether for a distributed or simple installation. This walk through goes through the deployment and configuration of the vCAC Identity Appliance, which provides a stand alone SSO instance for vCAC.

Some of the posts in this series are completed with vCAC 6.0.1, others will be with 6.1. Where there are differences I will aim to point them out!

This is the second article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model.

The diagram below shows the deployment at the end of this part, with vPostgres deployed and the vCAC Appliance running from the remote database.

An overview of the steps required are below:

• Issue and install certificates
• Deploy an external vPostgres appliance and migrate the vCAC database
• Configure load balancing
• Deploy a second vCAC appliance and configure clustering
• Install and configure additional IaaS server
• Deploy vCenter Orchestrator Appliance cluster

Create the required DNS records

First of all, create DNS records for your vPostgres database server – you need both an A and PTR record. Most VMware appliances will check for a reverse DNS lookup when they boot and will set the hostname accordingly.