In the first post of this series, we learned about the basics of HCX and discussed that HCX is available in 2 versions, i.e., HCX Enterprise (for On-Prem) and HCX Cloud (for cloud providers).

In this post, we will learn how to deploy the HCX Enterprise appliance on-premises and touch down on the basic configuration. 

The deployment of the HCX Enterprise appliance is very similar to the standard OVF deployment of any VMware product, and nothing fancy is there. The below slide shows the walk-through steps for deploying the appliance. 

Note: Make sure to deploy the appliance as “Thick provisioned, lazy zeroed.”

By default, the HCX ENT appliance is deployed with 12 GB of RAM, 4 vCPUs, and 60 GB of HDD.

Once the appliance boots up, login to the appliance by typing https://hcx-fqdn:9443 and using admin as the username and password set during deployment.

You need to have your HCX license key handy for activating the appliance. Your appliance should be able to connect to https://connect.hcx.vmware.com to get activated. 

You can choose to activate the appliance later as well.

Select the location where your data center is located and click Continue.

 

Provide a system name for the appliance and click continue. 

Hit continue to proceed further with configuration.

Next, connect your on-premise vCenter server and NSX manager with HCX. Provide the information, and click continue.

Accept the NSX-T certificate by clicking on the import certificate button.

Specify the IP address/fqdn of the PSC appliance for configuring SSO.

Restart the HCX application service by clicking on the Restart button for configuration changes to take effect. 

After restarting the service, verify that SSO, NSX, and vCenter connections are healthy and the status is showing green.

Verify all services are running fine.

Next is to do vSphere role mapping, which is a very important step. You are configuring users/groups who can manage the HCX appliance. By default, it is set to vsphere.local/Administrators.

Click on edit to modify this configuration.

In my environment, I am not using the default vsphere.local SSO domain and I have created my own SSO domain named ‘vstellar.local’

And that’s it for this post. In the next post of this series, I will demonstrate deploying and configuring the HCX cloud appliance.

I hope you find this post informative. Feel free to share it on social media if it is worth sharing.