Dedicated this article to talk about another VMware product that helps service providers to deploy a multi-tenant IaaS platform by converting their data center into elastic pools of compute resources which can be provided to end users with different allocation and consumption models.
When Installing/configuring VMware vCloud Director we need to adhere with few prerequisites, to start with ensuring vCenter Server networks which are planned to be used as vCloud Director external network or network pools must be available to all the hosts and vCenter Server should be set to the automatic configuration for both DRS and Storage DRS clusters.
Before installing the vCloud Director ensure your Linux system meets the minimum requirements with at least 2.1 GB of free space for installation and log files and a minimum of 6Gb of RAM per vCloud Director cell, CentOS 6, CentOS7, RHEL 5, RHEL 6 and RHEL 7 are some of the supported operating systems to choose from.
Another important point to take care before proceeding further with the installation is to take care of the SSL Certificates as the vCloud Director uses SSL to secure communication between client and server ensure two certificates are created for each member of the group and are imported to host key stores.
Before we begin with the installation of vCloud Director next thing to consider is the amount of VMware vSphere resources do we need, which could vary based on the various factors including the number of organization in vCloud Director environment and total number of users, when considering the vCloud Director cell vs vCenter ratio 1:1 model is recommended.
Few networking prerequisites to take care before you begin installation includes separate TCP/IP address for both HTTP Service and Console connections we can also separate them by using different ports.and as far as the time configuration is concerned we need to ensure all the vCloud Director server and the database server time is synchronised which can be achieved by using NTP.
When choosing the database for your vCloud Director environment both ORACLE and SQL Database are supported with 16GB of memory and 4vCPU as recommendations however when creating a database we need to ensure a separately dedicated schema is created.
When working with VMware vCloud Director Transfer storage which can be NFS or other shared storage is used as temporary storage to take care of uploads and downloads, ensure the storage must be accessible to all the vCloud Director cells in a vCloud Director cluster with proper root permissions.
While considering the security of VMware vCloud Director environment never connect VMware vCloud Director Servers directly to the internet, the only port recommended to open is 443 HTTPS for incoming connection and that too when you are planning to use a public cloud model and have external customers.
Next thing on the list is NSX Manager which is another required component for vCloud Director to provide networking related services, before we begin the installation of vCloud Director we need to configure NSX manager by associating a unique instance of NSX Manager with vCenter Server.
Associating Network Pool with Provider VDC is one of the key aspects to take care after the successful configuration of NSX Manager, as vCloud Director creates VXLAN Pools to provide network resources to the provider VDC Configuring VXLAN support in NSX Manager is of key importance.
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