How to deploy vCD 9.7 Primary Cell ?

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Hello All,
In this blog, we are going to talk about following :

  • Types of vCD Cells deployment
  • How to deploy Primary vCD Cell

Starting vCD 9.5 the appliance version of Cell is available.
We have 3 types of deployment:
1) Primary as the 1st member in a vCD server group.
Sizing :-
Small size -> RAM – 12GB & 2 vCPU or
Large size -> RAM – 24GB & 4 vCPU
2) Standby Used to join a primary cell in the DB HA cluster.
Sizing :- Ensure the size needs to be same as primary.
Small size -> RAM – 12GB & 2 vCPU or
Large size -> RAM – 24GB & 4 vCPU
3) vCD Cell Application as a subsequent member in a vCloud Director server group and connects to the primary DB.
Sizing :– RAM – 8GB & 2 vCPU.

There has been some major changes in support matrix for the supported DBs and now the PostgreSQL 10 is embedded with the appliance.

Figure 1

For the Purpose of this article, i am going to demonstrate deployment of 1 Primary cell and 2 standby cells.
From this experience i made some errors which you should avoid, please check!

Deploy Primary cell:
i have bunch of snapshots which will show what information needs to be provided to deploy the appliance and for configuration/customization.

Download the OVA from the vmware website and deploy the appliance as a VM.

FIGURE 1
  • Provide the information for compute resources and wait for the validation to complete.
  • Review the details of the OVA file.
  • Accept the license agreement.
  • Select the Configuration type: (Figure 2) (for demo purpose i selected SMALL)
FIGURE 2
  • Select the storage
  • Select Network (figure 3)
    In figure 3, we can see there are 2 network interfaces for the appliance.
    The purpose of eth0 is “Network for vCloud Director UI and API access“
    The purpose of eth1 is “Network for accessing internal services, including the embedded PostgreSQL DB Service“

Note: As per the VMware documentation and my personal experience also, both the nic cards should be on seperate network. I tried with same network and was facing weird network issues including port :5432 blockage.

FIGURE 3

Last part of deployment is divided into 4 category:

  1. vCD Appliance Settings:
    • Assign NTP server Address.
    • Root Password & expire it at first login
    • SSH policy
    • NFS Mount : transfer directory location it needs to be empty for primary cell and should have root read and write privilege as per Figure 5.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 5

2. vCD Configure – Required only for “PRIMARY” appliance

  • Ensure all the fields are filled 
  • Fill admin email as admin@abc.local, if you don’t have admin email at the moment.
  • System name should be as per dns record
  • Take a note of the installation ID. (We will used while deploying standby cell)

FIGURE 6

3. Additional Networking Routes:

  • As Figure 7 states, its used in case you are using CIDR network for eth0 and eth1 which needs network routes. 
  • As I am not using, its blank for me 
FIGURE 7

4. Networking Properties: Simple IP address settings for both ethx (FIGURE 8)

  • Define default gateway
  • Define domain name
  • IP address and netmask for eth0
  • IP address and netmask for eth1
FIGURE 8

Click next and FINISH.
Once the VM is created successfully, POWER-ON the VM and its process get completed.

To Ensure the installation was successful, connect to
HTTPS://IP_address/vcloud
and the login page of vCD must be available.

FIGURE 9

If UI is not available then refer to my last blog and try to find the reason and resolve.
We will cover the deployment of Standby cell and verification of DB HA cluster in the next post.

Hope this helps.
Cheers
Samesh Dhankhar

Samesh Dhankhar
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1 thought on “How to deploy vCD 9.7 Primary Cell ?”

  1. Pingback: Deploy vCD 9.7 Standby Cell & PostgreSQL DB HA Cluster Verification ? – LearningFingers

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