Blog Date: 4/14/2020

In my last blog, I walked through the process of Deploying the vCloud Director Appliance v10, and today’s blog will feature the process of deploying two additional standby appliances to create an HA database configuration for vCD. To get an idea of what that architecture would look like, I’ll rip this excellent diagram from VMware’s own documentation.

Deploying additional appliances are pretty straight forward, so lets get started.

1 – Find and upload the OVF for vCD.

2 – Name the VM, select the datacenter and virtual machine folder.

3 – Select the compute cluster

4 – The primary appliance has already been deployed. It is important to note that the same size standby appliance has to be deployed. Because our first primary appliance was deployed as small, so to shall the standby appliance. VMware’s sizing guide and be found here.

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

6 – Configure the networks for each network interface, keeping in mind that they will be in reverse order as discussed before.

7 – Fill out the template customization page just like before. Remember all fields including the administrator email are required.

Note:
– Be sure to use the same “System name” that was used for the original vCD primary appliance deployment.
– For the “Installation ID” section, make sure this value reflects increases with the number of appliance being deployed. In this demonstration I am deploying the 2nd and 3rd appliances, so the installation IDs would be 2 and 3 respectively.

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. I’d also take a snapshot of the primary appliance, to roll back any failed attempts to join.

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.

11 – After the appliance boots, look at the /opt/vmware/var/log/vcd/setupvcd.log to validate a successful cluster join. This log can also be used if the appliance deployment failed.

A successful join would look something like this:

12 – Now deploy the 3rd standby appliance using steps 1 through 11.

13 – Once the 3rd appliance has been deployed, it would be a good idea to log into the primary appliance’s 5480 page to validate the health of the new DB cluster.

14 – Log into the provider page (https://appliance_name.com/provider)

15 – Here we can also see the state of the cloud cells.

End – I’ll finish this blog post here. In my next blog, I’ll walk through the steps of configuring the newly deployed vCloud Director environment. Stay tuned.