VCF9 is here and I want to look at it. That said, I have some older hardware, so I am not sure if I will be able to run VCF9 on it. But let’s explore. Disclaimer: This is unsupported, and there is a reason for that. So don’t do this in production (of course, a nested environment would also not be used in production, but you get my drift). Install vCenter Server and Upgrade physical host First step is to…
First I deployed Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (although still called vRealize for that version): https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-aria-vrealize-suite-lifecycle-manager/, then I deployed vIDM (https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-vmware-identity-manager/), but if I now want to deploy additional components, we don’t get to choose the size, below a certain threshold. For instance, if I want to deploy Aria Automation (vRealize Automation), it’s minimum size is clustered. Aria Operations (vRealize Operations or vROPs) is minimum “Medium”: So I will deploy the Aria Suite products manually and then import them into Aria…
After deploying the Edge Clusters on both VCF environments and creating and connecting the T0’s, it’s time to deploy some Aria Suite components. For this I will first be deploying the Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (or vRealize, as it is still called, because of the version), from within the SDDC Manager. After that is completed, I can use this appliance to deploy and manage the Aria components. This is a split between the two control components SDDC Manager and Aria…
After deploying Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (although it was still called vRealize then), we go and deploy VMware Identity Manager (vIDM). For this we have a couple of requirements: First, we have to populate the ASLCM with the correct product. For now, we are just going to download VMware Identity Manager 3.3.7. For this, we go to: (there are more boxes to the right, but for the sake of grabbing the screen, I omitted those). And click on Add binaries:…
Next step in my VCF on VCF journey is building the networking between the two environments. Of course, I have my trusted pfSense appliances that do the routing, but of course, I want to be able to create my own NSX-based virtual network. So the first steps are to create a little design on what I want to accomplish. So in the first phase, I will be creating Edge Node clusters on both VCF WLD’s and configuring BGP between them,…
From one of my customers, I got a question on how they can downsize a stretched cluster in a VCF environment. This is basically following the first 5 steps in the “Replace a Failed Host in a Stretched Cluster” article: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/5.0/vcf-admin/GUID-92FD3AEE-5B5F-421C-B722-44AE0314D84E.html So I though, I’d try it out. We need to do the following steps: So, first, we get the Host ID’s. For this we go to the “Developer Center” in the SDDC Manager and click on: API Explorer. There…
Because I have had some issues with my lab in the past (having to rebuild it a couple of times) I switched my storage to iSCSI (see https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-iscsi-configuration/), but I also wanted to have another means of redundancy and for that I am using vSphere Replication. I will replicate my two VCF instances to each other. The following setup is what I will be aiming for: So the “odd” volumes are Production and the “even” volumes are Replication (I will…
Because my lab has seen a couple of failures, with regards to storage, I got the advice to move my Management VM’s away from the vSAN, since a distributed storage layer on top of a distributed storage layer is not the best option, from a availability perspective. So I have been building a couple of Truenas iSCSI servers, in order to store my VM’s there and at the same time configure some replication, so I am safe from any issues…
Normally I am not that much into “step by step” upgrades of any kind, but since VCF 5 dropped today, I thought, maybe show how incredibly simple upgrading is. So first of all, make sure that you see the version within “Release Versions”: Then we can go and download the necessary components, in “Bundle Management”: There we download all the necessary bundles: Once the bundles have downloaded, we can start the updates. First step is doing a Precheck, to make…
Because I created a template and redeployed this template a couple of months later, the password for the root account of the SDDC Manager ánd the root account of the vCenter server had expired. This led to a non-functioning SDDC Manager: And logging showed that there was an issue with a password: Changing the root password for the SDDC Manager wasn’t that big of an issue, just open a console, try to log in as root, and change the password,…