This series was originally going to be a more polished endeavour, but unfortunately time got in the way. A prod from James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) has convinced me to publish as is, as a series of lab notes. Maybe one day I’ll loop back and finish them…

Requirements

Routing

Because I’m backing my vCloud Director installation with NSX-T, I will be using my existing Tier-0 router, which interfaces with my physical router via BGP. The Tier-0 router will be connected to the Tier-1 router, the NSX-T logical switches will be connected to the Tier-1, and the IP networks advertised to the Tier-0 (using NSX-T’s internal routing mechanism) and up via eBGP to the physical router.

This series was originally going to be a more polished endeavour, but unfortunately time got in the way. A prod from James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) has convinced me to publish as is, as a series of lab notes. Maybe one day I’ll loop back and finish them…

RabbitMQ for vCloud Director

RabbitMQ High Availability and Load Balancing

The vCloud Architecture Toolkit states

This series was originally going to be a more polished endeavour, but unfortunately time got in the way. A prod from James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) has convinced me to publish as is, as a series of lab notes. Maybe one day I’ll loop back and finish them…

Prerequisites

I’ve deployed a CentOS7 VM from my standard template, and configured the prerequisites as per my prerequisites post. Updates, NTP, DNS and  SELinux have all been configured. I have added a 200GB disk to the base VM, which has then been partitioned, formatted and mounted to /nfs/data - this will be the share used for vCloud Director.

This series was originally going to be a more polished endeavour, but unfortunately time got in the way. A prod from James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) has convinced me to publish as is, as a series of lab notes. Maybe one day I’ll loop back and finish them…

Prerequisites

PostgreSQL server deployed and configured

Two vRO 7.4 appliances deployed

Before powering them on, add an additional network card on the vcd-sql network

This series was originally going to be a more polished endeavour, but unfortunately time got in the way. A prod from James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) has convinced me to publish as is, as a series of lab notes. Maybe one day I’ll loop back and finish them…

Installing PostgreSQL 10 Server

The base OS for the PostgreSQL server is CentOS7, deployed from the same template and with the same preparation as detailed in the prerequisites post.

Yesterday, Pivotal Container Service 1.1 dropped and, as it’s something I’ve been actively learning in my lab, I wanted to jump on the upgrade straight away. PKS with NSX-T is a really hot topic right now and I think it’s going to be a big part of the future CNA landscape.

My Lab PKS 1.0.4 deployment is configured as a “NO-NAT with Logical Switch (NSX-T) Topology” as depicted in the diagram below (from the PKS documentation). My setup has these network characteristics:

When vRealize Lifecycle Manager 1.2 was released recently, I was keen to get it installed in my lab, since I maintain several vRealize Automation deployments for development and testing, as well as performing upgrades. With vRLCM I can reduce the administrative overhead of managing the environments, as well as easily migrate content between environments (I’ll be blogging on some of these cool new features soon).

However, I hit a snag when I began to import my existing environment - I couldn’t get the vCenter data collection to run.

Yesterday saw the release of NSX-T 2.1, with some new features and also some usability enhancements. You can check out the release notes here https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX-T/2.1/rn/VMware-NSX-T-21-Release-Notes.html

As I’m mid-way through this blog series, I thought I’d stick in the upgrade as a little bonus!

Download the upgrade bundle

Validate the version and status of NSX-T components

Check the Controller cluster status and Manager connections are up.

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.

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.