In our last post of this series we have configured the vCloud database and made it ready. This database will be used by the vCloud Director Installer to connect to and setup the database.

I am not using the standard ovf vcloud director installer provided by VMware. I wanted to know how the installation is done and configured so I choose to install vCloud Director on RHEL server.

For list of operating system supported for installing vCloud Director please refer the vCloud Documentation Page from VMware.

Pre-requisites before installing vCloud Director:

1: A server with Redhat as guest operating system installed and configured. Hostname and DNS should be configured.

2: The Redhat Server must have 2 NIC’s and each with different IP address (preferred) for HTTP and Console connection. This server should be reachable to your database server over the network.

3: vCloud Director installation file (bin file) downloaded and copied to server where it will be installed.

4: Certificates must be generated for http and console-proxy connection.

My Lab Setup:

I have installed RHEL-6.5 64 Bit server on one of my Esxi host. This server have been assigned 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM.

The server have hostname setup correctly and also DNS is configured and reachable:

I have 2 different NIC’s configured and each NIC has different IP address.

I tested ping connectivity to my database server and found working.

Everything looks OK. So it’s time to proceed with vCloud Director Installation.

1: Generating the self-signed certificates files: Following command is used to generate the SSL certificates for use with vCloud director

[root@vcd~]# keytool -keystore vcd.ks -storetype JCEKS -storepass vcl@2015 -validity 9999 -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias http

[root@vcd~]# keytool -keystore vcd.ks -storetype JCEKS -storepass vcl@2015 -validity 9999 -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias consoleproxy

Once the certificates is generated you can list the certificates by using the command

[root@vcd~]# keytool -storetype JCEKS -storepass vcl@2015 -keystore vcd.ks -list

Confirm the presence of your certificate file by typing ” ls -l ” command

Now we will proceed with installing vCloud Director. I have uploaded the vCloud director setup file to my server.

By default this file have permission rw-r-r (read-write,read,read). Before starting installation we have to give execute permission to vcloud installer file otherwise installation wont start.

Execute permission can be given to any file in Linux is by using the command:

# chmod +x filename

see the color of file have been changed to green after we have provided the execute permission to this file.

Now start the vcloud director installation by typing the command

[root@vcd~]# ./vmware-vcloud-director-5.5.2-2000523.bin

The above command will extract the installer file and install vCloud-director rpm’s to the system.

Once the rpm installation is finish the installer will invoke one script which will configure the vCloud instance that have been installed.

Press Y if you want to configure right now or press N if you want to do later.

Note: If you press N then you have to use command

# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/configure to configure the vCloud instance later.

I pressed Y so the script started asking me some questions which needed manual input from me.

First of all it will ask for the IP configuration for the http and console-proxy connection. You can choose which IP will be used for which purpose.

Secondly it will ask for path of the certificate file which we have generated in earlier steps.

My certificate file was located at /root partition but somehow the script was not accepting the path which I was giving.

It took me a while to realize the cause of the issue and I have included the solution to this in my post Troubleshooting vCloud Director SSL Certificates Issue

Once you follow the steps shown in post you will be able to proceed.

The 3rd question which script was asking was info about the database.

Once again the installer tested me as it was not able to reach database server and connection was timing out.

I have covered the troubleshooting steps for this issue in my post Troubleshooting vCloud Director Database Connection Issue

Once the database connectivity issue is resolved you are good to go.

Now when you will enter your database server details it will connect the database server and start configuring it. You will see something like below on your screen once the DB configuration is started.

The installer will ask you whether you want to start vCloud director service now or later. Press Y if you want to start right now.

Note: If you press “N” at this stage then you can later start the services by invoking command # service vmware-vcd start

I pressed “Y” as I cant wait anymore to start using my vCloud director.