Part 2 - Adding HA to vCD 10.X Configuration

Blog Series

In the previous post, we installed a single vCD appliance so if we now login to our vCD appliance we will a single vCD appliance with Role as Primary. VMware Cloud Director provides a self-service portal for tenants, managing virtual machines, and orchestrating workflows. In this blog, we will aim to create another vCD node to provide HA or known as VMware Cloud Director Server Group.

Management VM Sizing Requirements for 2 vCD cells

Since we have deployed it in our lab already the primary appliance, this will be the new change post vCD-Cell-02 deployment

VM	Version	vCPU	Memory GB	Storage	Quantity
vCenter	7.0 U1	2	10	100GB	1
vCD-Cell-01(Primary)	10.0	2	12	120GB	1
vCD-Cell-02(Standby)	10.0	2	12	120GB	1
NFS-01	NA	2	2	40GB	1

1- Deploying the Standby vCD uses the same approach as deploying the primary node. Select deploy VM from OVA file and choose the OVA downloaded

2- Choose the cluster to deploy the VM to

3- Review the details of vCloud Director

4- Accept the license agreements

5- The Standby option is now used to deploy the secondary node when you configure vCD appliances in a HA mode

6- Select the virtual disk format as thin disk and choose datastore location and click Next.

7- eth0 and eth1 should be on a different network to configure vCloud Director in Primary/Standby mode.

Select the Destination Port Group for the Appliance and Click Next

8- Select the management port group from the destination network dropdown and click Next

9- Review the settings and click finish to start the deployment.

Hostname
Network 1 IPv4 Address
Default IPv4 Gateway
Network 1 Netmask
Network 2 IPv4 Address
Network 2 Netmask
NTP server list
DNS Servers
Domain Search Lists
Transfer Storage Location

10- Untick the option expire password at first login, enable SSH

Under NFS mount we will need to put the same NFS server mount we created earlier

11- Skip CEIP

12- Provide a complex administrator password, give the vCD System a name as vCD01

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 appliances being deployed.

In this demonstration I am deploying the 2nd and 3rd appliances, so the installation IDs would be 2 and 3.

13- This section is only required if you going with static routes

14- Provide all these details, as it’s our new vCD appliance we’ve named it as vcd-cell-02

15- Provide IP details and subnet mask

16- Click Finish to complete the installation

The OVA should start to deploy and once done, power on the VM.

17- Launch a web browser and connect to the VCD management address via https://vcdip:5480 with root/password

18 – As expected, we now see both our vCD cells in HA configuration.

19- If we now review our transfer storage location we can now see these being created

20- To access the vCD use the following link https://IP Address of FQDN/provider Use the administrator username and password provided during installation and we can see both our cells running.

Management VM Sizing Requirements for 3 vCD Cell

Likewise, we can add one more vCD appliance into an HA config. Its recommended that there are 3 members so we will always have 2 VCD appliances as standby and 1 acting as the primary node. This setup ensures continuous operation and data protection in case of node failure. By providing redundancy, it allows for a seamless failover to a standby cell if the primary one becomes unavailable.

VM	Version	vCPU	Memory GB	Storage	Quantity
vCenter	7.0 U1	2	10	100GB	1
vCD-Cell-01(Primary)	10.0	2	12	120GB	1
vCD-Cell-02(Standby)	10.0	2	12	120GB	1
vCD-Cell-03(Standby)	10.0	2	12	120Gb	1
NFS-01	NA	2	2	40GB