We have prepared the environment for VCF deployment. Its time to move to CB and discuss the “Deployment Parameters” excel sheet in detail. You can find my earlier blog here.
Login to Cloud Builder VM and start the deployment process.
Select “vCloud Foundation” here,
The other option “Dell EMC VxRail” to be used when your physical hardware vendor is Dell.
VxRail is hyper-converged appliance. It’s a single device which includes compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources. It comes with pre-configured vCenter and esxi servers. Then there is a manual process to convert this embedded vCenter into user manage vCenter, and that’s when we use this option. If possible, I will write a small blog on it too.
Read all prereqs on this page and make sure to fulfill them before you proceed.
Click on “Download” here to get the “Deployment Parameter” excel sheet.
Let’s dig into this sheet and talk in detail about all the parameters here.
“Prerequisites Checklist” sheet from the deployment parameter. Check all line items one by one and select “Verified” in the status column. This does not affect anywhere; it is just for your reference.
“Management Workloads” sheet.
Place your license keys here.
This sheet also has compute resource calculator for management workload domain. Have a look and try to fit your requirements accordingly.
“Users and Groups”: Define all passwords here. Check out the NSX-T passwords, as the validation fails if it does not match the password policy.
Moving on to next sheet “Hosts and Networks”.
Couple of things to discuss here,
DHCP requirement for NSX-T Host TEP is optional now. It can be defined manually with static IP pools here. However, if you select NO, then DHCP option is still valid.
Moving onto “vSphere Distributed Switch Profile” in this sheet. It has 3 profiles. Earlier VCF version had only one option to deploy with 2 pnics only. Due to high demand from customer to deploy with 4 pnics, this option was introduced. Let’s talk about this option.
Profile-1
This profile will deploy a single vDS with 2 or 4 uplinks. All network traffic will flow through the assigned nics in this vDS. Define the name and pNICs at row # 17,18 respectively.
Profile-2
This one deploys 2 VDS. You can see that the first vDS will carry management traffic and the other one is for NSX. Each vDS can have 2 or 4 pnics.
Profile-3
This one also deploys 2 vDS, just that the VSAN traffic is segregated instead of NSX in earlier case.
Select the profile as per your business requirement and move to next step.
Next – “Deploy Parameters”
Define all parameters here carefully. If something is not good, the cell would turn RED. I have selected VCSA size as small since we are testing the product.
Move to NSX-T section. Have a look at the AVN (Application Virtual Networking). If you select Yes here, then you must specify the BGP peering information and uplinks configuration. If it’s NO, then it does not do BGP peering.
TOR1 & TOR2 IPs interfaces configured on your VyOS. Make sure to create those interfaces. We will see it in detail when we reach to that level in the deployment phase.
We are all set to upload this “Deployment Parameter” sheet to Cloud Builder and begin the deployment. That is all for this blog. We will do the actual deployment in next blog.
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