Vcf-ems-deployment-parameter.xlsx

[Carlota Sproul]

Ihave setup a second euronas NAS system, where I added my old SATA 3 magnetic disks to it with the same hardware-based raid controller with the difference that I use 2 x 1.8 TB NVMe Software Raid 0 as caching devices. I plan to use this as well in my deployments for my Holodeck Toolkit soon.

Playing with a single ESXi to install a nested VCF 5 lab with VCF Holodeck Toolkit (because Holodeck is only supported to be used with a single host and there is my challenge: my disks are not that big in size).

In the past, I took a look at TrueNAS CORE which I ran nested on one of my ESXi hosts. But this storage solution did not like my Hitachi HUA723020ALA641 SATA HDDs and threw errors after some time and I did not have other disks available.

Looking around, you can find your perfect solution for your use case, no doubt. From every vendor above, I had collected two to three different options but I did not order anything. I continued looking for something where I could re-use my oldest hardware with 4 cores and a Broadcom AVAGO Raid Controller and finally found it here.

I downloaded Premium Plus R6 (get an overview here), attached the .iso to my Supermicro IPMI UI and installed it. After the reboot, you get the IP address you need to connect to, and a user admin with the default password of euronas.

In my case, I have a JBOD. Clicking Configure on the right (then Clear Configuration), the current configuration can be cleared (this will delete all virtual drives attached to the controller). After this step, click on Personality Management and change the current personality from JBOD to RAID:

To be clear here, I had my challenges to use a nested environment. I will dig into it and see what I could use from other people to speed up my basic deployment and configuration of ESXi Hosts. First, I will check out the configuration of the components involved.

VCF 4.0.0 has been released on 14th of April, 2020. So let us take a look into it. The most important topic is filling out the vcf-ems-deployment-parameter.xlsx sheet, plan, and prepare everything upfront before you start.

For a customer project I needed to deploy VCF 4.0.1 with BGP loopback addresses on a Cisco Fabric (spine leaf setup). As you may already know VCF requires BGP configurations to configure BGP peerings in NSX-T. The VCF design we have is a little different from the blueprint (VVD 6.0.1). Instead of having the BGP peerings configured on the spine, we are configuring it on the leafs and instead of having 2 Edges, we are configuring 4 Edges as shown below:

Because of the limitations we have with the Cisco Fabric setup, we are using loopback addresses as the BGP neighbors for the Edges. Reachability to the loopback from the firewall will be configured using a static route on the firewall, pointing to the Anycast Gateway IP on the VTEPs. But how do we deploy that with standard workflows from Cloudbuilder? In this article I will show you how to do so.

In the vcf-ems-deployment-parameter.xlsx workbook, I have entered some dummy value in the BGP neighbor IP address column. Make sure that the dummy value is based on the same subnet as the uplink networks. If not, it will not pass the first JSON validation tests.

Change the BGP Neighbor IP Address to the loop back address, Max Hop limit and refresh the status of the BGP Neighbor. If everything has been configured correctly on the physical switch (leafs) and in the BGP Neighbor (AS number, IP address, Passwords and Max Hop Limit), you should see the status reporting back as Success.

Login with SSH into the Cloudbuilder appliance. The excel workbook file will be converted to a JSON file during the deployment. In my case, there was a file called vcf-public-ems.json that contains all the configurations from my workbook.

This is not an official workaround released by VMware, but a workaround that was found by myself. If you have any questions related to this article, please do not hesitate to contact me by twitter, linkedin or through the contact form.

3a8082e126