VMware Cloud Foundation - Deployment Observations
Simon Eady
I have been working with VMware Cloud Foundation recently and while for the most part things went well there were occasions where challenges were encountered which made the delivery to the customer all the more trickier than expected.
This article is a list of observations and things to most definitely check or watch out for when delivering a VCF project.
We were working with VCF version 3.7.2 (yes I am aware 3.8 has arrived but that was too late for the delivery in this project)
- DNS DNS-Reverse Lookup (this is a pre-req) VCF -needs- this, yes it is a given, but nevertheless check it.
- OVA File (Windows IaaS VM) make sure this has not been sys-prepped (this is in the documentation)
- The OU the OVA Windows IaaS VMs goes into needs to not be too constrained as to prevent the execution and installation of the vRA IaaS Components (it will just fail if it is)
- To mitigate the Group Policy OU problem we experienced we had the IaaS Machine accounts pre-created however this did not work because as we found out the same account that created the machine accounts must be used in the deploy or it will fail. (this is not always possible depending on how locked down the Active Directory is)
- SQL Mode 120 or less -must- be used, as we all know now, this does not appear to be checked in the validation before deployment.
- Our customer wanted to use a custom port SQL Server port 9432 so we set the port in the .cfg file on SDDC manager however this did not work. So in the meantime we had to set the port for the SQL server to the standard 1433. This allowed a successful deployment in the LAB build. The only thing we did not do post the .cfg file change on SDDC manager was a reboot although this is not mentioned in the documentation.
- The SQL Server vRA DB name is case sensitive (this caught us out)
- vRA deployment via VCF does not apply vcoadmins to the default tenant admins group thus you cannot configure vRO properly till the account is added. (will be fixed in future releases of VCF).
All in all using VCF on this version is a better experience than previous versions but in my opinion still needs to improve.
I know with VCF 3.8 there is better integration with LCM and the relationship between SDDC Manager and LifeCycle Manager (this is a good thing).