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VMware Cloud Foundation vRealize Suite Software Install bundle is not visible!

Posted on by vrealizeredemption

Hi,

Recently we did a deployment of VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0.1 which I would say went pretty smooth.

This is a great solution which automates most of the manual tasks we perform while installing the SDDC components and the best part is it uses VVD in the back end to ensure all the best practices are followed.

Now once the SDDC components are deployed you need to download vRealize suite bundle via SDDC manager.

SDDC manager queries depot.vmware.com to list all the software available for download.

The bundles can be found under repository tab of SDDC manager.

In our case the main bundle for latest version of vRealize Automation suite was not visible even after waiting for a long time.

Later to resolve this issue we had to increase the polling interval to every 5 minutes.

Follow below steps to perform the workaround :-

  • Edit /opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-app/conf/application-prod.properties,
  • change lcm.core.manifest.poll.cron=0 5 * * * * to lcm.core.manifest.poll.cron=0 */5 * * * *
  • Restart lcm service (systemctl restart lcm)

 

The changes made in the application-prod.properties config file helped resolve this issue.

Hope this helps!

VMware: A Cloud Company

Posted on by vrealizeredemption

VMware: A Cloud Company

VMware: A Cloud Company

This was originally posted on Medium on October 10, 2018. View the original here. With VMworld US 2018 complete and the information coma subsiding, I felt it was best to write this blog based upon months of thought and meditation focusing on the word… cloud. Through this blog, I will be using screenshots from VMworld The post VMware: A Cloud Company appeared first on VMware Cloud Community .

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VMware Cloud Foundation – 3.0 Deployment Tips and Tricks!!

Posted on by vrealizeredemption

VMware Cloud Foundation provides a unified software defined platform to extend private cloud to the public clouds.

It is a fully integrated Software Defined Datacenter with compute, network and storage virtualized.

For compute virtualization it uses vSphere, for storage vSAN and for network NSX.

VCF 3.0 was released on 20th September 2018 and now has a Bring your own network concept.

With the earlier versions of VCF until 2.3.2 there was a strict dependency on the ToR switches as there were only few which were compatible.

With VCF 3.0 you can bring any ToR switch you have in your datacenter and also choose not to have a separate Management switch.

With the previous versions of VCF management switch was mandatory but now if there is no requirement of a Out of Band network connectivity you can choose not to install it.

 

Below is the software BOM for VCF 3.0. Refer https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/3.0/rn/VMware-Cloud-Foundation-30-Release-Notes.html

Software Component Version Date Build Number
Cloud Foundation Builder VM 3.0 20 SEP 2018 10044179
SDDC Manager 3.0 20 SEP 2018 10044179
VMware vCenter Server on vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 U2c 13 AUG 2018 9451637
VMware Platform Services Controller 6.5 U2c 13 AUG 2018 9451637
VMware vSphere (ESXi) 6.5 EP8 16 AUG 2018 9298722
VMware vSAN 6.6.1 EP8 14 AUG 2018 9152287
VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.1 25 MAY 2018 8599035
VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 11 APR 2018 8183617
VMware vRealize Automation 7.4 11 APR 2018 8229492
VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.6.1 07 JUN 2018 8597028
VMware NSX content pack for vRealize Log Insight 3.7 n/a n/a
VMware vSAN content pack for vRealize Log Insight 2.0 n/a n/a
vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 12 APR 2018 8234885

VCF 3.0 does not need a VIA appliance but there is a requirement of Cloud Foundation Builder VM which will be used for the initial bring up of the management workload domain.

Cloud builder VM is a OVA and should be imported on a vCenter or workstation. Ensure cloud builder VM and Management network of ESXi hosts are on the same L2 network as they closely interact with each other during the bring up process.

Important things to consider before and after the initial bring up process :-

  • Do not patch components outside of cloud foundation LCM. Patch it from SDDC Manager
  • Do not add/remove Hosts from vCenter server. VCF will not know of this information and will skip lifecycle management of the hosts
  • ESXi must be pre-installed with VCF 3.0
  • DHCP server to configure IP address for the VTEP on each ESXi hosts
  • Configure Jumbo Frames MTU 9000
  • Ensure there is no partition except ESXi OS on disks/SSDs used for VSAN. If there is a partition detected the validation will fail. Delete the partition by booting a Linux ISO.
  • DNS entries for all the components (Ensure forward and reverse lookup works)
  • Configure NTP on ESXi host.
  • Bring up process will also deploy vRealize Log Insight cluster with 1 Master and 2 worker nodes with ILB configured to balance the load.
  • You need licenses for ESXi hosts, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, SDDC Manager. vRealize suite is optional and its components (vRealize Automation/vRealize operations Manager) can be deployed after the bring up process.

If your DNS and NTP are not configured properly the validation will fail.

Once the bring up process is complete and successful launch SDDC manager UI to create new virtual infrastructure domain.

Management workload domain will hosts all the management VMs whereas VI workload domain will hosts the business/production VMs. With each VI workload domain an additional vCenter is also deployed.

VCF 3.0 also has an option to create a new cluster withing the workload domain. You can also expand the existing cluster via SDDC manager VM.

Learnings :-

We did hit some bugs during the deployment of VCF 3.0 and have also raised a PR for the same. We expect the bugs will be fixed in the next release.

One of the bugs was DNS and Network Connectivity validation fails even though nslookup and ping works for all the components from ESXi.

Later it was confirmed by Engineering that it is a bug and suggested us to follow below steps on the cloud builder VM :-

  • Copy network_util.pyc (provided by Engineering) to a specified location.
  • Please rename the existing file so that we can revert to the original file if required.
  • Once the file is copied to the location please retry platform audit.
  1. Cd to . /opt/vmware/sddc-support/cloud_admin_tools/PlatformAudit/common
  2. Rename network_util.pyc to network_util.pyc_old
  3. Copy this new file to same location.

Once the steps were followed the validation was successful.

A successful validation will take about 1 hour of time whereas the actual bring up process for the management workload domain takes 4-5 hours. This is considering everything goes smooth.

In our case we faced one more issue with NSX while doing host preparation during the initial bring up. For some reasons the host preparation task was stuck in progress and nothing was happening.

Just before this the NSX manager was in a panicked state and we had to reboot to bring it up.

Later we did open a PR and involved NSX Engineering to kill the host preparation process and perform the host preparation manually from NSX manager.

Once the manual host preparation was successful the entire deployment went smooth.

Today we have a fully functional management workload domain with all the SDDC management VMs ready.

The plan now is to use SDDC manager VM to deploy vRealize Lifecycle manager VM and later consume its API to deploy vRealize Automation and vRealize operations manager cluster.

VMware Cloud Foundation has certainly reduced the time as well as the complexity of deploying all these components.  The best part is customers can also consume it as a service in public clouds and later use Hybrid cloud extension (HCX) part of VMware Cloud Foundation Enterprise edition to migrate workloads seamlessly across the clouds.

I see it as a game changer when most of the customers today have a Hybrid cloud strategy.

 

Hope this helps!