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 Suite LifeCycle Manager that make the dependency between SDDC Manager and the Aria components a lot less strict. And that reduces complexity in a huge way. From my experience with my customers, I can say that I think this is a good way to increase the usability of VCF.

So, we start deploying Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (ASLCM). We follow these steps:

• (Deploy Edge Cluster)
• Download Bundle
• Create AVN
• Deploy Aria SLCM

(a prerequisite to doing this, is an Edge Node Cluster, which I wrote about on: https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-networking-setup/, although for the Management Domain, the Edge Cluster is deployed with “Static Routes”, so no BGP checks and failures to be expected).

First step is downloading the bundle. After enabling the credentials in Online Depot:

(and waiting a while), we see the bundle we want to deploy, under Bundle Management:

So, we click “Download Now” and wait for it to download.

In the meantime, we can work on the prerequisites to deploy the Aria SLCM appliance, described in: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/5.0/vcf-admin/GUID-59E5BEE3-B157-426D-A40C-F21171586863.html

We are going for VLAN-based segments, so within SDDC Manager we go to the Management Domain and select Add AVNs.

We choose to create a VLAN-backed NSX segment, VLAN 2611 for Region-A and 2711 for X-Region. Both backed by the pfSense01 for routing.

On the earlier deployed NSX Edge Cluster.

The Gateway addresses are living on the pfSense01, so routing is in place in the “physical world”.

And Finish:

Which will start a new task:

and create a Transport Zone and the segments in NSX and attach the hosts to the Transport Zone:

And we see the segments in Distributed Switch:

Now we are ready to deploy Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager:

Click on Deploy and in the next screen on Begin, after validating that all prerequisites are in place:

We have created the DNS entries, including reverse lookup, for: aslcm01.my-sddc.vcd (in the AVN-X-Region network).

It already prefills the right information, based on the AVN and the SDDC Manager configuration:

We need to select an IP-Address from the correct VLAN, for the Tier-1 Gateway, which will serve as a Load Balancer for the Aria Suite.

And click “Finish”. Which will validate and then initiate a task within the SDDC Manager:

And when it is finished, it will look like this, in the SDDC Manager:

When deployment is finished, I will go and create a new certificate for the new appliance, in the same way that we did earlier in https://my-sddc.net/creating-a-vcf-lab-on-top-of-vcd-part-2a-certificates/.

And when that is finished, we can deploy other components from the screen above. I’ll start with the vIDM appliance (since it’s the first one). But first we have to take care of some settings within the ASLCM.

Like connecting to the Customer Connect environment, in order to download the right packages. We do this by setting up a MyVMware Account:

Next blog will be about deploying VMware Identity Manager. It is a little much to put this all into one single blog.