Blog Date: 04/07/2020

Prior to this blog post, blogged and walked through the steps of creating a NFS linux server using CentOS 7. You can find the link to that blog post here.

The VMware Cloud Director (vCD) platform is primarily used by service providers, as a cloud offering for their customers. Back when I worked for a service provider, the bulk of my experience came from the version 8.x days, when vCD was a software package to be installed on a Linux VM. Fast forward a few years, and I’ve started deploying vCD 9.7 and vCD 10 appliances for VMware customers, part of Professional Services engagements for VMware that I’ve been working on. Interestingly enough, both customers were not cloud providers, but had specific use cases that vCD achieved.

The vCD appliance deployment certainly is not as clean as other appliances like vCSA and vROps, and I’ve found there to be a few gotchas that can lead to a failed appliance deployment.

Deploying the vCD appliance

1. Like most appliance deployments, we’ll deploy an ovf template.

2. Name the virtual machine, and select desired deployment datacenter and VM folder location.

3. Select the desired compute location

4. Select the size of the appliance. As this is the first primary cell, select an option that contains “primary”. If you are deploying appliance cells two and three, then you’d select “standby” here if you are creating a cluster. The “vCD Cell Application” would be used for the fourth appliance.
– You’ll also notice two different sizes: Small and Large. These will depend on your environment needs. VMware’s official sizing documentation can be found here.

5. Select desired storage disk format and storage where the appliance will reside.

6. We’ve arrived at the first gotcha: Selecting the network. This is the only ovf deployment I’ve seen that lists the NICs in reverse order. VMware states in their official documentation that “the source network list might be in reverse order. Verify that you are selecting the correct destination network for each source network.” I have yet to see the networks display in the proper order. VMware also states that eth0 and eth1 must be on separate networks in their documentation here. I’ve asked GSS but wasn’t given an answer why. I haven’t found an issue with both connections being on the same network, but for demonstration purposes we’ll do as the official documentation says. Note: I have noticed at least in my lab that the appliance uses eth1 to connect to the NFS server.

7. The second gotcha: Filling out the template customization page. It’s not indicated here that ALL fields are REQUIRED. Yes even the email address is a hard requirement, even though no other appliance deployment requires it.

8. On the summary page, verify the deployment and click finish.

9. Before starting the appliance, it may be a good idea to take a snapshot. Once the appliance has been started, and the configuration scripts attempt to run and fail, the appliance will need to be redeployed.

10. Once you have started the appliance, watch for the “Guest OS Initialization Script”. This should take a couple of minutes to run in order to be successful. If it runs for less than 10 seconds, then there was a problem and the appliance will need to be redeployed.

10a – If the appliance failed to deploy, log into the appliance as root, and look at the /opt/vmware/var/log/vcd/setupvcd.log for details.

10b – On a successful run, you’d see something similar to:

11 – On a successful deployment, log into the appliance 5480 page, and you should see something similar to:

12 – The primary appliance has successfully been deployed. If additional standby appliances are needed, now would be the best time to deploy them.

End – That’s it. In upcoming blog posts, I’ll walk through the process of deploying additional standby appliances, and the initial configuration of vCloud Director.