Transcription
Hi everybody, Stephen here. In this video, we're going to talk about how do I set up my VMware Cloud Foundation version 9 management domain. So, I'm going to take you through step by step, starting off with the ESXi host and with the VCF installer, and then getting everything ready for that. So, stick around.
Thanks for sticking around everybody. So, as I mentioned, in this one, we'll we're going to actually talk about how do we set up our first VCF instance. Um, I got a bit of a review here because there's been some changes. If you've watched my VCF version 5 videos, I would suggest watching those. They're still valid. There are some big changes since version five. So, you're going to want to take a look at those videos as well. Um, but anyways, before we begin, I got a small little lecture component, and we'll dive right into the to the demo. Uh, and I always like to throw this out at this part here, right? So, if this is stuff that you're interested in, please consider supporting the channel. It's totally free. Just hit that subscribe button, you know. Uh, also, other ways to support the channel is leaving comments, sharing the videos, all that stuff helps with the YouTube analytics. Uh, and I also have super thanks enabled, but that's totally up to you. So, why don't we get started?
Okay, so um, Cloud Foundation, just a quick review. Uh, basically, what it is, it allows you to create your own private cloud. Uh, essentially, what when we look at it, it is basically a combination of compute resources like vCenter and ESXi host, storage, uh, vSAN, let's say, NSX for our networking. So, it's it's got all those and and management as well. We'll talk about that. There's been some changes there, and it has all those combined as one single product, right? Things have changed since version five. So, basically, you have uh VCF is going to basically have all those products. You'll be licensed, licensed for it. Okay.
Um, now, a couple of terms. There's a VCF fleet. Well, with VCF, uh, well, a VCF fleet is basically a fleet of VCF instances. So, we'll take a look at that. But anyway, so under your VCF fleet, you would have multiple VCF instances. We'll take a look at that. Then you have your VCF operations and VCF automation to manage those. Now, that used to be called Aria for Aria for automation, sorry, Aria for automation, Aria for operations, which used to be called vRealize for operations and vRealize automation. It's now called VCF. Okay. Uh, so we have this term called a fleet, and a fleet is could be a single instance of a VCF environment or multiple instances of a VCF environment. I don't know if there's a maximum number. I haven't, I've been looking around, I haven't seen one as of this recording. Now, what we're going to do in this video, we're going to look at a single instance. Okay? And we're going to deploy this thing called the management domain. All right? Uh, very similar to what we talked about back in version five. So, the management domain will have your vCenter server. We'll have NSX manager or managers. Uh, back in version five, you only allowed to support, you can only deploy three of them in a supported environment or production. Uh, you now get a choice of deploying a single manager deployment. I'll talk about that when we get there. Uh, you have a vSphere cluster, and you have this thing called the SDDC manager. Um, great, that's the management domain. Then you can create additional workload domains, just like in version five. We used to call them VI workload domains. They dropped the VI. So, it's now just called workload domains in version 9. And a workload domain will basically have, you know, vSphere clusters. So, this is where you have your um, your workloads running, whatever they are, virtual desktops or whatever the case may be. Each workload domain will have its own set of vCenter servers and its own set of NSX managers. So, you'll see there's the work uh, the vCenter server and NSX managers for workload domain one. The purple one over here is for workload domain two, and then you got the orange ones over here. And these appliances run inside the management domain, just like in version five, to be honest with you. Okay.
Now, when you go to deploy this in version five, you had this thing called Cloud Builder. So, you would download this appliance. It was a fairly large appliance. You would deploy your ESXi host, four of them you needed, and then you use Cloud Builder and a spreadsheet to populate it. Again, you can watch those videos. Cloud Builder's gone. That spreadsheet thing is gone. Now we have this thing called the VCF installer. VCF installer, which is much nicer, and we're going to see that. Okay. Uh, there's no more uh preparation, sorry, there's no more worksheet um uh spreadsheet that you use to uh import into this Cloud Builder thing. All that's gone. So, we'll actually see that. Uh, what also has changed as well is so this is what we're going to do. We're basically deploy our single fleet. Uh, we're going to set up our management domain, and it's going to deploy our VCF for operations and VCF automation. So, this whole process that I'm going to walk you through, uh, once it starts going, it's going to take probably about three and a half hours to complete. We're not going to sit there and wait for the whole thing, right? But you'll see the management domain, get the vCenter server, NSX, our vSphere cluster, and the SDDC manager. And you'll see you have additional workload domains. I'll do separate videos on that. We're just going to focus on this one right now. Sorry, get rid of that one down there. We're going to focus on that. One thing I'm going to mention here, because I know some people are going to make comments on it, the SDDC manager is being deprecated um in favor of VCF for operations. So, today it's there. Um, but in the next release, I hear it could be like 9.1. Don't quote me on that. Uh, who knows? We'll see what the future brings. The SDDC manager will disappear. All right. So, you'll see most of the stuff now in VCF 9, most of the management we don't do in the SDDC manager like we used to. We do it mainly in VCF operations, and I'll walk you through some videos on it. But we first need to get everything up and running. So, why don't why don't we do that now? Um, let's get the VCF installer deployed. Okay, so why don't we do that right now?
Okay, so uh, why don't we begin? We're going to install the uh the VCF installer. Now, I just want to mention something about that. Let me just go back to my iPad here. I just go to a whiteboard. Um, now, first of all, when we set up our management domain, here's our management domain. Management, you're typically going to have some ESX hosts. Notice I said ESX. They dropped the I in version 9, so it's no longer called ESXi. It's called ESX. Yeah. Anyways, um, now your management domain in version five, you have to have four ESX hosts. One, two, three, four. That requirement's gone now. Also, in the management domain, you must have had, must use vSAN as the the primary data store. That's gone now as well. So, you don't have that. You can actually use NFS for your your data store if you want to for your management domain, or vSAN, or fiber channel. Okay, so look at the requirements. Uh, you can go as little as two hosts here. I wouldn't do it. vSAN, you can go as low as three hosts. In my demo here, I'm going to stick with the four hosts that I've always done. Now, the VCF installer, there's that appliance. Now, this is really interesting. The VCF installer is an appliance. So, VCF installer is an appliance, and you can deploy that on maybe a machine over here. Maybe it's a separate, separate ESX host, and you're going to install the VCF installer here to deploy your environment. That's fine. If you do that, the VCF installer knows to deploy the SDDC manager over here. You could also, let's say you're using fiber channel storage or NFS over here. Let me get rid of the vSAN. You could, if you already have storage set up here, you could technically install the VCF installer appliance on one of these hosts. It will detect that it's already inside the management domain, and it'll say, "Oh, you know what? I don't need to deploy the SDDC manager. I'm just going to convert myself to the SDDC manager." So, it saves you a bit of time. What I'm going to do in my lab environment, I'm nested. So, my four hosts are actually VMs running on top of a real host. Uh, I'm going to deploy mine on my real host, my VCF installer. Okay. Uh, so now you, you could install the VCF installer on a on a workstation, uh, a laptop running VMware Workstation, and do the deployment from there. Um, I would probably prefer a server type machine. It'll probably be faster. So, anyways, that's what I'm going to do here. Let's go into my into my environment now. Let me log into my vCenter and oops, nothing's getting typed there. Let's try this again. And I'm going to speed up some of these these installers or or I might just stop it and then we'll see what happens at the very end type of thing. Okay. So, you'll see in my environment, I got one, two, three, four. I got a fifth host there. I'll tell you the reason why I got a fifth one there. I got my DNS, DNS servers here as well. Uh, I got a router. Anyway, you don't have to worry about those other ones. Here's my router and stuff like that. Um, now, what I'm going to do, I'm going to deploy my um my VCF installer now. So, I'm just going to right click on this, say um new appliance. You download, and this is also the other tricky part here. If I go into here, if I go to VCF 9 installer, it says SDDC manager. So, if you're looking specifically for the appliance saying VCF installer, it doesn't exist. It's the VCF SDDC manager appliance. That's the installer. Okay. So, that can be confusing. So, okay, great. I'm going to go next. I'm going to give it a name. I'll call it VC-installer. I'm going to put dash two on there because I've already got another one in the background. I'm going to go next. I go whatever there. And then it's going to ask me to review the details, pick the storage that's going to be on, and we'll just go through and do the the quick install. All right. Uh, come on. There we go. So, I'll agree with this again. Read the licenses. Go through that. It's going to ask me what data store. Again, it's a VM. What data store am I going to put it on? I'm just going to pop it on this one over here, my slow data store. It doesn't really matter. I'm going to go thin provisioning. Actually, you know what? No, I'll put it on uh one of my faster ones here. I'm going to go thin for thin provisioning, and I'm going to go next. Uh, you're going to pick your network here. Now, the VCF installer needs to be able to talk to the management network uh on your ESXi host. So, your your first network card, your management interface. So, your installer should be on the VLAN that those hosts are on, or should be on. Yeah, should be on the physical network. So, it's got to be able to reach those hosts. Okay. In my lab environment, my network is called internal. So, that's where my hosts are. Okay. So, whatever your network is, you want to make sure you pick the appropriate one. So, I'm going to go next. Now, it's coming up and asking me for passwords. Again, you'll notice over here, it has to be 15 characters and a whole bunch of requirements there. And I don't care if you see my password or not. It's getting blown away after this. So, we're going to copy and paste that. I'm going to scroll down, copy and paste, paste. Uh, now the host name, um, I'm going to call it vcfinstaller.vclass.edu. You must have DNS set up for this, okay? Uh, so your DNS servers all must be set up, forward and reverse lookups. Also, stuff fails, right? So, mine's called VCF installer.vclass.edu. My NTP servers, again, uh, NTP is also another important thing. You want to make sure you have that set up. I I'm picking these um these VC um these NTP servers I've already previously used. What's the IP address of this going to be? Um, my VCF installer in my lab environment, it's going to be 172.20.10.161. Okay, great. What's the subnet? Mine's going to be 255. And what's its default gateway? Right. So, you'll specify your IP stuff. Now, again, make sure you got forward and reverse lookups. I don't think it's so critical with the VCF installer, but um uh but yeah, if you're going to be using it as SDDC manager, you want to make sure that's set up as well. Uh, what's my domain here? Again, mine is vclass.edu. Uh, and my search path is going to be vclass.edu. And then it's going to be asking me for my domain server. So, uh, so these are my uh, sorry, my DNS servers. Uh, I only got the one in my environment. So, uh, sorry, that's actually the wrong one. That's the one I want. Okay. Um, so, great. I'm going to click next. Gives me a summary. Check it all out. Make sure it's okay. And you hit finish. And it starts deploying the appliance. Okay. So, way to go. It's starting to deploy the appliance. Now, um, while that's deploying, why don't we do something here? Let's check my ESXi host. So, you must deploy your ESXi host. Now, one of the things I'm going to show you in my lab environment, these are VMs. And if I actually show you here, you'll see I've got 24 virtual CPUs and 96 gigs of memory inside each of these. That's pretty intense, right? And the reason why I got 24 virtual CPUs is because when it deploys Aria Automation, that appliance needs 24 virtual CPUs. Okay? So, if you decide, well, I don't need that much, you get a choice of not deploying the automation or automation, which I'll show you. You can get away with as low as 16 here, and it's actually will need at least 16. Okay. Um, so this thing's, you know, not for the faint of heart. Uh, the other thing too is um, let me go to now, one of the things when you do a fresh install of your ESXi hosts. Okay. Um, if I go to here, let me just go to one of my hosts here. Host one. I I know I'm using self-signed certificates. Let's look at the certificate here. When I look at the certificate, you'll see the common name. It's the name of the host, which great, that sounds good. That doesn't happen when you first install ESX. Okay, let me go to my host five. This is the reason why I have a host five there, just to show you this, because I got all my other ones all set up. So, before I even start, you know, deploying VCF, deploy your ESXi host. Uh, you need to set up their uh NTP on those. If you don't know how to deploy ESX, watch my videos on it. It's pretty simple, right? Uh, deploy them, set up your DNS, uh, set up your management network. Uh, and then also make sure you got NTP set up as well. Uh, the other thing is, let me look at host five here. Let's go to site A-ESX-5. I'm still used to say ESXi.vclass.edu. Uh, okay. Now, let's look at this one here because I I kind of just spun this one up. Notice the name here says localhost local domain. It does not match the host name. Okay. So, you need to fix that before you start your deployment of your um VCF uh management domain. Uh, it will come back and fail. It'll say, "Hey, the host name doesn't match this certificate, right?" Um, so you need to again, unless you're using your own self-signed certificates, maybe I'll do a separate video on that, but I need to go in and fix this. So, actually, so if I had SSH enabled on that host, I could SSH into it. I don't. Let me just uh go into the host itself. So, pretend it's a physical host and I'm going to remotely connect to it. I'm going to open up the console on that and I'm just going to hit F2 to log in. And then I'm going to go into troubleshooting options. If I had SSH enabled, I could have SSH into it. I don't. I'm going to enable the shell. Now I'm going to hit Alt F1. And I'm down at the shell prompt. So, I'll log in as root. Okay. Now I'm going to, if I type in hostname here, you'll see uh oh, okay. So, the hostname, that's the hostname. Oh, interesting. I got local. Doesn't really matter. Uh, I need to change my directory. CD space sbin. Then I need to run this command, generate certificates. There we go. I just generated a certificate to match that hostname. All right, let me hit Alt F2 to get out. I'm going to disable my shell and I'm going to go in here and say restart management agents. And I'm going to say, yep, F11. Sorry, F11. Okay. And you need to do this on all your hosts, unless of course you're replacing it with your own self-signed certificates. And again, certificates can be done after you deploy everything as well. But this has to uh this has to be done prior to uh deploying your management domain. So, it looks like it's done. Let's hit enter. Let me exit to get out of here. And let's try this again. Now, let me go back to here. Close this. Close this. I don't care about that. And let's go into my host five. So, five done. And let's go into the certificate and we see it now matches. Okay, so matches the hostname. So, you need to do that even if you're using self-signed certs, or the installer when it goes to do the validation, it will fail. So, I'm not going to be playing with that host. We don't care. I've already got my other four hosts up and running. Um, so let's see what we've got here. And looks like deployed. It deployed. Okay. And what we're going to do now is actually log into it. Okay. So, uh, where is it? Vclass. I put it in temp. There it is. VCF installer 2. I'm going to right click on that. I'm going to power on that VM. Okay. And I'm going to give it a few minutes to power on, and then we'll connect to it. So, I'll be right back. Hey, by the way, if you haven't subscribed to the channel, hey, click that subscribe button. Totally free. So, we'll be right back.
So, we're back. The VCF installer didn't take that long to install. So, I'm just going to type in its fully qualified domain name, and I'm going to log into it. Actually, I probably should have typed in HTTPS. There we go. And again, I'm going to log in with the local admin account that was created during the install. And I'll type in the passwords that I also specified as well. So, when you get to this part here, the first thing you need to do is download the binaries. So, this is different from version five. Version five, we had the Cloud Builder appliance already had the binaries there, which was kind of nice. Uh, but now you need to download it. Okay, no problems. And you got to. So, what we need to do is download binaries over here. Notice it says no depot connection. Let's click on that. And then over here, connect to the online depot. You click on configure. You'll need to specify your download token. Don't worry, that doesn't work. Hey, let's give it a shot. Right? If you got a proxy server, you'll set that up. It's not going to work. Okay. Um, so this is where you need to have this token. Right now, I've done a whole video on this. Um, especially for V-Mug Advantage users, you're going to want to watch that. Okay. So, I'm setting up an offline depot. I'm going to go configure and I'm going to specify my offline depot. Oops. And um, this one username, password. Now, I've got a video on showing you how to do this. I'm going to click on configure and oh, wait. You go whatever Chrome and then there we go. There's my offline depot, and I've also shown this in the video. So, right now I'm going to uh deploy VMware Cloud Foundation. I'll do a separate video on vSphere Foundation, but let's start off with the hard one first. So, I can select all these and then hit download. So, I'm going to hit download all all these, and you'll see it's going to start downloading from my offline depot. I'm not going to make you watch this. So, we're just going to basically uh like I said, I've already got this all recorded if you want to watch that. So, this will probably take about 20 minutes to do or 15 minutes. I can't remember. So, uh, we'll be right back and then we'll continue on.
Okay, so we're back. Everything's been uploaded and validated. Took about 15 minutes or so. So, let's uh go back to here. Let's click on return home. Uh, we're pretty much ready to rock and roll at this point. We see we everything's downloaded and looking good. So, now I'm going to go to the deploy wizard here. Let me go full screen. On the deploy wizard, do what I want to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation or vSphere Foundation. I'll do a separate video on the vSphere Foundation. But let's click on Cloud Foundation. Now, it comes up and says, are is this a brand new deployment or is this a VCF instance in an existing VCF fleet? Other words, you already have other VCF instances. This is a brand new one. I'm going to keep the default and go next. Now, existing components. Do I already have VCF operations and vCenter server? Um, I'll probably do videos on doing upgrades and or sorry, imports and converts. Uh, but for now, this is all brand new. So, no, I don't have any existing stuff. I'm going to click on next. Now, it's asking me what version. That's the only one I got downloaded. What's the instance name of my VCF? We're going to call it something that makes sense, but I'll say VCF um demo, whatever. Um, and then um, what's my management? Actually, you know, I'll just leave that. Yeah, I'll say VCF DOM domain. Um, then what's the management domain going to be? I'll call it management-dom for domain. I'm sorry. Now, here it talks advanced network configuration. I want to connect VCF operations automation instance to a different distributed uh uh port groups or NSX segments. Says by default it will uh configure all the operations and automations. Use the same distributed port groups uh uh specified in our configuration, which you'll see later on. We got to go through these 10 steps. I don't need anything fancy. I'm just going to leave this basically as is because this is my only VCF instance. Uh, quite possibly maybe if you had another one, you may want to specify that, but I don't. Now, over here under high availability, um, this is where it's different in version five. Um, in version five, you had to deploy three NSX managers, and there was ways around it, and I had videos on that, but not in a production environment. You now can actually go simple uh single mode. Um, and um, and deploy a single NSX manager. Uh, there's other stuff that gets affected by this, which you'll see as we go through here. Um, but anyways, just for resources in my lab environment, I'm going to go single or simple mode. Um, I would not recommend this in production. That's just my personal opinion. What's my DNS? What's my domain name? Uh, my domain name here is going to be vclass.edu. I'm changing everything up. What's my DNS server? My DNS server here's.11 and then my NTP servers here I got to match it. Bear with me a second. And uh okay, so I got to specify that DNS server. Come and I'll put another sorry, NTP server. Uh, do I want it to automatically generate passwords for me? I'm not going to come back and give you a password file afterwards. I'm just going to say and I'm just going to leave the uh enable customer experience involvement program. I'm going to go next.
Now, it's asking me for my VCF operations. What's the um uh so what size of appliance do I want here? I'm just going to go small. Uh, notice again the number of CPUs. Again, this is really going to depend on how many instances this thing's going to manage, right? I'm just going to select small over here. Now, operations primary u um primary fully qualified domain name. What's the fully qualified domain name of this appliance? And I've got vcops.vclass.edu. You need forward and reverse lookups. Uh, notice it's not asking me for an IP here. It's going to do a reverse lookup. If it doesn't find it, it's going to give you an error. Uh, now, what password do I want to specify? I'm going to use the same password as before. And I'm going to copy that. If you're doing something what I'm doing here, I'm not um copying and pasting passwords. You want to make sure you got it right the first time. Again, I don't care if you see my password here. This stuff gets blown away. Um, what's the fleet management appliance fully qualified domain name? This used to be the life cycle manager. So, that's the fleet management appliance. And I'm going to call mine vcflcm.vclass.edu. Do I want to use the same password? Sure, why not? Say some doing some typing, but that's up to you. And then the collector appliance. Again, this is all part of operations. It's got a collector appliance. Uh, I called mine vcollectors.vclass.edu. All that's looking good. Okay. And then I'll use the same password. So, that saves some steps there and typing in passwords. We're on number four here. Now, automation. I want to connect the VCF automation instance later. You can optimize. You can optionally pick this this appliance here. Again, what's a fully qualified domain name for this? I call mine vcfa.auto.vclass.edu. And again, I would type in that password. Oops, wrong key. Let me just check that. That looks good. I'm pasting that in. So, this is a fairly large appliance. That's that one I told you that takes 24 virtual CPUs, right? Uh, and if you don't have enough, it's going to fail during a deployment. Um, now node IP. It's asking me what additional IPs do I want to allocate to this one's going to be a node. Here they say automation requires a single node and a simple deployment. In addition, uh, provides a second address to be used when creating nodes for upgrades. It uses this temporary address for doing upgrades. So, this is why it's asking you for these uh how do I want to prefix these nodes when they get created? I'm just going to call mine VCF auto. Again, whatever you want. And then the internal cluster slider as well. It defaulted at this. I'm just going to leave it um at the defaults. I'm okay with it. Um, I'm not sure when you would change that. Somebody knows chime in down below. Let's click next.
Now, it's asking me my vCenter server uh um information here. So uh vclass.edu. What size appliance? This is going to depend again. This size here is going to depend on how many VMs are running inside your management domain, how many workload domains you're going to have. So, all this stuff has to man uh match up. Uh, so I'm just going to select small for mine. Um, and then, uh, what's the data center name? It's going to call it this one here. Uh, management-dom- um, looks like DC L01. And the cluster name, again, you can change all these names. And the single sign-on domain, VCL or vSphere.local. Sounds good to me. I'm just going to leave all these defaults. You could change them. Uh, and then what's the administrator passwords and the root passwords? Again, I just copied and pasted those. So, again, specify your cluster names and stuff, or you can stick with the defaults. The NSX manager appliance. Again, how big do you want this? Medium, large, or extra large. This depends on basically how many uh for your management domain, you shouldn't medium should be more than enough for you to be honest with you. You shouldn't have anything more than that. Uh, when you get into workload domains, that might differ, right? So, medium's pretty much all you need for management domain. I can't see you going any larger than that. Unless, of course, sorry, you're going to add multiple clusters to your management domain um and you're not going to have workload domains, then you may have to have it a larger size here. But for the most part, you should be okay. Look at the sizing of NSX manager. Okay. Uh, what's the fully qualified? Now, it's asking me to cluster fully qualified domain name. Well, hang a sec. I'm only deploying one manager because I I specified simple install. It still wants that cluster fully qualified domain name. So, mine is siteA-esxmgr.vclass.edu. And what's the appliance name? It's funny how it doesn't remember this one. Mine's a siteA-nsxmgr-1.vclass.edu. Uh, and then the passwords. I'm just going to put in the same passwords that I had for all the others. Again, follow your security guidelines. They may not have the same passwords. It really depends. So, all that looks good to me. Let's click next. Again, notice it didn't ask me for IPs because it's doing reverse lookups on all that. So, this is why you it's important you have DNS all set up.
What kind of storage do you want? So, now this is new in version 9. You can have VMFS on fiber channel. So, maybe my servers got fiber channel adapters hooked to a fiber channel storage, and I've already got volume set up. So, you need to have those volumes already formatted and everything before you even get to this stage. Or you have an NFS. Notice it says NFS version 3. So, again, for the management domain, it has to be version 3. Anything after that, any workload domains and stuff, it could be version 4.1 of NFS. This is what we got for our choices. I'm just going to go with vSAN. Uh, do I want to go with express storage architecture? Original uh, just in my lab environment, I'm going to go with original storage architecture just because I just feel like it. Um, again, your hardware in the real world needs to support this stuff. If you're using express storage architecture, it has to be vSAN Ready Nodes. So, all that stuff from a support perspective. I'm just going to go with original storage architecture. What's the name of my data store? It sounds I don't know. I can leave, I can change this afterwards, but yeah. Okay. That's the name of the vSAN data store. And it fails tolerate. What do you want to be your default over here? And do I want to enable deduplication and compression with original storage architecture? Uh, if this is something you want to, if you're thinking about doing it, you want to do it now than after the fact because it has to move things around and do like a reformat, which could be a real pain in the butt. So, this is something if you're using original storage architecture and you want to do deduplication compression, you want to do this right now in the beginning so all the drives get formatted properly. I don't care in my lab environment. I'm going to go next.
Host. Now, what's the host password? So, I'll type in the host passwords there, and then I got four hosts. I'm going to click on add host and then I type in the host. So, I need that esx-1.vclass.edu. I hit add. Let me just copy and paste that and change the name. Oops. Number two. Number three. Again, like I said before, you don't necessarily need to have four here. With vSAN, you can get away with three. Now, I'm just going to stick with the four. So, there's the thumbprints. Are those the actual thumbprints? You want to check that out. For me, I'm going to say, "Yeah, confirm all the thumbprints." I'm going to go next. Now, if I didn't change that certificate, this is where it would fail. It come back and say, "Hey, your certificate local blah blah blah local domain doesn't match the hostname." Obviously, I I fixed that on mine.
Now, over here, your management. Now it's asking you for network information, right? So, what's the management VLAN? In my lab environment, I just have VLAN zero. My MTU 1500 is fine. In my lab environment, what's the subnet for my management domain? In my lab environment, mine's 172.20.10.24 and it's sub and its gateway is 172.20.10.10. Then it's also going to create this VM management network as well. To me, it's the same network. And your environment may may have something different. You may have a a VLAN for management VMs and a VLAN for your ESXi host management. That's quite valid. Okay, so they could be in different VLANs, but in mine it's the same. I'm going to say use the same here. Now, what's my vMotion network? Mine's on a 20 VLAN. Uh, my MTU size at 9,000 looks good. Uh, again, here you got to make sure your physical environment supports that. Just don't say, "Yeah, 9,000's good and and go with it." You know, you want to make sure that's that's supported. My CIDR for my vMotion network is 172.20.20 network. Sorry, 172.20.20.20 network. And my range, uh, I'm going to start it at 172.20.20.51. And it's going to go to 172.20.20.59. And again, you put in your appropriate range and my gateway. That's my vMotion network. Since I'm doing vSAN, it's going to ask me for the stuff for vSAN. So, my vSAN network's on the 30, 172.20.30. My MTU, yes, I've got 9,000 set up. My gateway is 172.20.30.10. And my IP range are going to go 172. Oops, not 20. It would come back and give me an error on that. 172.20.30.51 and 30.59. That's my environment. So, again, you put in the appropriate IPs for your environment.
And we're on number 10. Now, this is the part where you're setting up your distributed switch. You have to ask yourself, how many network cards does my physical host have? Do if I only got two network cards, then the default is basically that's all you got. Notice it says this profile is recommended in the default configuration provides unified fabric for all traffic types. What it's saying here is you're going to have one distributed switch, and all traffic is going to go across that distributed switch. So, maybe you only get two nicks. That that distributed switch, you'll have two uplinks from each host, and you'll have your vMotion traffic, vSAN traffic, you'll have your NSX traffic, management track all across that. Or you can say no, I don't want that. I got four nicks. I'm going to have two for I'm going to the first distributed switch will be used for everything else, and the second one will be used for vSAN traffic. Or you could say I got four nicks, and now I want to have NSX traffic separation. So, everything will use the first I my first distributed switch will be for vSAN and management and all that stuff. And then the second distributed switch will be for NSX overlay traffic. All right. I'm going to pick that because that's just what I want. Now, if you got more than that, if you got like six or more cards, you can go into custom switch configuration and really configure this thing to whatever you want. Maybe I'll give two two nicks for the management and stuff, two nicks for vSAN, two nicks for NSX, that type of thing. So, you got some flexibility here. So, I'm going to pick this one. This is what I want. And notice over here, it comes up and there's a little red mark there. So, it's saying, hey, I got to configure because I got four nicks. I got to configure um my NSX environment. So, let me open this up, and you'll see this will be the distributed switch name for my NSX. The MTU is, yep, that's good. That's what I support. I can have two uplinks on there. Okay. Uh, you know, I can have one. You don't want to have one. If I have more nicks, I could put more on there. Then it's going to ask me for the nicks and the uplinks. Now, notice it's already picking these for me, right? It says, "Oh, second second adapter. I'm going to use these physical nicks, right?" And that's fine. Uh, then over here, it's asking me the network traffic type. This is basically saying, do I want to have multiple taps or not? If I do explicit failover, I'll have one tap IP and uh, if something, and all traffic goes through one uplink. If something should happen, that tap will fail over to the other. If you don't know what a tap is, you got to watch my NSX stuff. All right, I'm going to just leave the default route based on source port, and both links are active. Okay. So, each host will get two tap IPs. That's considered, I don't like using the term best practice, but that's kind of what they're saying here. Uh, the transport zone. Um, it's going to create this transport zone for me. Yep, that looks good. I'll just leave the name there. What VLAN? This is what I got to specify. My tap, my tunnels, my Gene tunnels will be going through VLAN 11. How am I assigning IPs to my taps on my hosts? I'm going to use a pool here. And you'll give the name of a pool. I called mine VTAP pool. Whatever. I don't got much of an imagination. Give it the description. What's the subnet that that VTAP pool will be on? Again, Bobby will be 172.20.1. This is going to create all these pools for me in NSX. If you're familiar with NSX, if you're not familiar with NSX, this stuff sounds like, you know, you know, uh, something weird. You need to learn a bit on NSX. And then this is my pool. It's going to start at my first temp will take 11.150. My ending one will take 11.170. Make sure you got enough range for all yours. And then my taps uh, gateway addresses there. So, I just configured all this stuff for my NSX overlay. I'm going to click next.
Now, it's asking me for the fully qualified domain name for the SDDC manager. Again, notice remember I said if I deployed this on one of the hosts in the management domain, it would convert the installer to the SDDC manager. Um, in this case, I'm not doing that. So, it's going to ask me for the uh fully qualified domain name. And there's mine right there. Um, and I got to type in the password. And let me just check that. Yeah, that looks good. Let me just copy and paste all that. I'm not a big fan of copy and pasting here because if I made a typo there and I don't realize it and I try to log in, right? And at that point, I'm going to hit next and it comes through and asks me to review it. So, I'll go through and review that. Okay. So, you want to check all this stuff uh out and make sure it's all okay. And uh I got the right domains here, all that stuff. And and you hit next. Okay, now it's going to validate everything. This process will probably take uh about 10 minutes, if I remember correctly. Uh, your environment may differ, but um, like I said, once this validates, everything should be okay, and we should be able to deploy it. All right. Notice you also have at this point here, let me show this download JSON spec, right? So, I could have what I could have done is actually loaded up a JSON spec in the beginning. So, maybe you've you've done this, and now you want to deploy another VCF instance very similar to this, but maybe change some names. You can modify the JSON spec. So, one of the advantages of deploying the VCF installer on a separate host is you can now use that to deploy other VCF instances. Copy that JSON. Make some changes. Boom. Spin up your next VCF instance. Do the same thing for the third and the fourth, the fifth. Right? If you deploy the VCF installer on top of one of the hosts that's going to be in your management domain, then that's going to be converted to the SDDC manager, and that's only going to be used at one time, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that, right? Um, notice over here vSAN uh disk availability. So, it's actually checked for this. I'm in a nested environment, and um there's challenges with express storage architecture in a nested environment with VCF. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's a lot more pickier. That's why I picked the original storage architecture. So, I don't want to mess around. There's some fixes on the on the interweb type of thing. Now, it's checking my network configuration. It's checking all these. So, all those gateways have to be pingable. Okay, it's doing all all. So, my network, my vMotion, vSAN, and my overlay, all that stuff has to be pingable and set up. So, we're almost done here. I'll just let this run. I'll probably speed it up, and then we'll see what happens.
Okay. So, we are back. Everything's successful. Again, I can download this JSON if I want to. As I mentioned, if there was a problem here, you get a chance to rerun. If there were warnings here, like I've run into situations where for whatever reason my NTP wasn't syncing or something like that, uh, I I would acknowledge it. So, warnings, you can acknowledge it and continue. Errors, anything that fails, you have to go back and fix it. That's it. I'm going to hit deploy now. And um, at that point, you'll see, let me just get rid of this down below here, you'll see this portion here of deploying vCenter. So, it'll walk you through the whole instance of deploying here, right? Then you can go through the workflow here. Let me go full screen. And again, you can go through here and actually look at the individual workflows and examine it. This is going to take about three hours, three to four hours in my lab environment. So, we're not going to sit here and and watch this. Uh, I'm going to cut this off at this point. We'll come back when it's done, and we'll just take it from there.
Okay, everybody. We're back. Uh, actually, let this thing just run overnight because I don't feel like sitting here. Uh, so let me log back in um to the VCF installer and uh, let's see how things. So, we see here, previous deployment completed successful. Let's hit the view details. So, again, you see over here, kind of went through. If there's a problem, obviously it will come up and show you a red mark where it kind of had some issues. I ran into some issues with configuring NSX because of my old um my old DNS servers to support it needed to support EDNS. Um, and mine didn't. That's how old it was. That's why I had to create a new DNS server. Anyways, uh, again, you can open up the the workflows here. You can see everything. And again, if there was problems, it would be reflected here. So, uh, looks good. Um, let's see how long it took. Anyways, sorry. Let's go back in here. And looks like, um, it's about 6:20. And that can't be right. Oh, yeah. Sorry. That's about right. Yeah, 6:20. Uh, and it completed around 11:30. So, five hours. Quite a long time. Actually, the reason why it took so long in that on my machine is because I actually had um my ESXi hoster on my old on my slow SAS array and not my NV RAM. So, that's going to sorry, not my um not my SDS solid state drive. Sorry about that, folks. So, again, your mileage is going to vary depending on how fast your servers are and stuff, but I've done it in the past, done about three hours to do this. This look obviously a little longer. So, from uh 6:30 roughly my time to about uh 11:30. So, about 5 hours. Quite a long time. Anyways, uh, let's just see what what it did here. Um, let's kill this. Let's log into. I'm going to log into the SDDC manager. Uh, and I know might get a few people frowning on that, but anyways, we're just going to do it anyway. A-SDDC manager. The SDDC manager is going to be deprecated, right, in the next version. So, technically speaking, you you shouldn't even really be doing anything in there. I don't know if there's certain things that that you have to do in there today. I haven't compiled a list. I'm going to go to advance. I'm going to present here. Now, you might be wondering, so let's log in as VCF. No, actually, no. Log in as administrator@vsphere.local. And um, so I hear that this is going to go away. You should be doing everything in VCF Ops. Um, the reason why it's still there, you can actually see right here, if I open this up, it's got this.
big message here. So, it did a check here. DNS check, platform forward, reverse lookups. It did a bunch of stuff there. Everything is looking good.
Um, like I said, this is going to be deprecated in the next release from what I understand. You should be doing everything in VCF ops. You might be wondering why why do we need this then? Because VCF ops basically still have links that point back to this. Okay. So, till they get everything ported into VCF ops, this is still there. We still need it. Okay. So, we'll just ignore that.
Uh let's log into uh let's log into my Vsenter server, right? And uh we'll see what we see here. So, you see there's my management domain. Here's my four hosts. You see one of the hosts here is complaining. I'm know it's going to be memory host memory usage. It's complaining about that. Look at that. The memory usage on it is fairly high. Uh and I can pretty much know exactly the reason for that. If I click on VMs over here, it's this VCF uh auto uh VCF automation appliance. It's that's that one I told you that has 24 processors. It's got 96 gigs of memory. So um pretty intense machine here. Uh my VMs, my this is a nested environ. My my hosts should I probably bump them up to 128 128 gig to be honest with you. You see all the appliances that are deployed. You have the SDC manager, the vsenter server. pretty straightforward on those. You see the NSX manager, there's only one because I decided to do the simple deployment. VCF auto and and VCF ops. Again, only got one of those. It's not a cluster deployment because I only decided to deploy one. See, there's life cycle manager. Um, and again, you have your ops collector. So, these are all the different VMs that are deployed.
Let's look at my NSX. Let's take a look at that real quick. And I'm going to log in as admin. And I'm just gonna whatever clear all this stuff, skip all that. And let's go back to this here. And then under networking, if I click on that, uh, if I go to network topology, um, there's going to probably be nothing there. There's this thing called a default transit gateway. I'll do a separate video on that. Um you'll see there's no tier ones, there's no tier zeros, there's no segments which is rather interesting because in VCF5 we had this thing called application virtual networks and that's where we deployed all the Arya stuff. What's going on here? We deployed technically the Arya stuff that's VCF automation and VCF operations. It's going on regular port groups now. So they made some changes here in version 9.
Uh let's look at system here. I should have my cluster fabric of hosts over here's my uh management cluster. I got my four hosts. They're all prepared. I've got my tap IPs, multitaps. It's all configured for me, right? Uh so that's cool. There's no edge nodes. We don't have any edge nodes. Um we'll uh we'll talk about deploying those. There's a couple ways we can deploy it.
Um, let's look at VCF ops. How about that? VCF uh what is the VCF ops? vclass.edu and again local account admin and uh here we go now. So you see that's all configured. Let's look at VCF automation as well. VCF uh is a dash just auto.bclass.edu. This is kind of a tricky one. It's going to ask you for the organization name. We haven't created one yet. So, I'm going to go in as system. Let's go into system. And then my default user ID will be admin. And then the password that I set during the uh deployment using the installer. And at that point, come on. Should come up. There we go. I'll probably do separate videos on all this talks about, you know, enabling the supervisor. I'll do separate videos on this, but for now anyways, I do Let's go back to the uh let's go back to my installer here and just uh bcf-installer. Oops. And let's um let's go to view details and then I'm just going to kill this. And the reason why I'm showing you this because it's all deployed. But over here, next steps, log into VCF operations, navigate to license, and uh apply your license is right now. I got a 90-day evaluation license when you actually do this deployment. So, you need to actually log in. And it gives you the link to log in, the user ID, and even shows you uh the password. So, I'm already logged in, right? Let's click on it. Anyways, so uh then it's telling us to go to license uh uh license management here. I can't fully demo this. I don't have licenses. Uh us V-Mug Advantage members are still waiting for that. I'm hoping to hear something at Explore next week or sorry the week after. But anyways, you click on registration. It tells you to start the registration process. Tells you to log into the VCF business services on Broadcom, right? So you got to log in. If I click on this, it's going to ask me to log in. It's going to fail because I don't have an account. You then you create this activation code and then you enter the activation code. Okay. So hopefully I'll be able to do a video on this sometime down the road, but right now again uh I don't have any licenses here and this is good for 90 days. I will talk about VCF operations. I'll do some other videos.
Um, I think that is about it. I don't think there's anything else I need to kind of uh cover. But anyways, I hope you enjoyed the video. Hope you found it uh useful. Um leave comments, questions down below. And please consider supporting the channel by subscribing. It's totally easy just and free. Hit that subscribe button. Helps me uh help you folks, right? Uh but that's it and uh we'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.