In last post of this series, I discussed about vCloud Extender architecture and its capabilities. In this post I will walk through steps of configuring vCloud Extender in cloud provider side.
vCloud Extender is deployed as ova and deployment steps are straight forward as shown in below slide show. Just make sure to select deployment type as “cx-cloud-service” on customization template page.
Once appliance is deployed and boots up, it will show the browser link to access the appliance for further configuration.
Connect to appliance by typing https://appliance-fqdn/ui/mgmt and login with administrator user and password set during deployment.
Click on Setup Wizard to start configuring the cx-cloud-service appliance.
Register appliance with your management vCenter. If your environment have PSC external to VC, then use PSC IP/FQDN for lookupservice url.
Next is to register cx-cloud appliance with the vCloud director. Enter your vCD details and administrator credentials.
Note: No need to append @system with the username.
Accept the vCD SSL certificate.
Proceed to Next step once vCD is successfully linked to CX-Cloud appliance.
Next is to link resource vCenter. This VC is the one which is registered in your vCD and providing compute resources to your cloud infrastructure.
Note: For Lab/POC deployments management and resource vCenter can be same.
Click on update button and enter the details of Resource VC lookup service.
On successful registration, Resource VC will show as Registered. hit next to continue.
On Replication Manager page, enter details of your Datacenter/Cluster and hostname/ip details for the manager appliance. Once you enter all details and hit Next button, deployment of Replication Manager appliance will be kicked via ovftool.
Once the replication manager appliance is deployed and boots up, you will see a message “Successfully created Replication Manager”. Hit Next to go to Activate Replication Manager Page and set root user credentials and Public IP details.
Note: The external (public) IP address is the address to which tenants connect their on-prem appliances. Make sure to append port 8044 after punching in your IP address.
Hit Next to continue.
Hit Next when Replication Manager is Activated.
On Replicator page enter hostname/IP, Portgroup, Datacenter and Cluster details.
Once again a new appliance will be deployed using above details.
Once appliance boots up and is configured, go to Activate Replicator page and enter root credentials for this appliance and the lookup service details.
Also set the Public Endpoint URL.
Note: You can use same public ip for specifying endpoint url for both replication manager and replicator appliance or different IP’s.
In my lab I am using local IP as both on-prem and cloud site are locally connected.
Hit Next to continue.
Hit Finish on the ‘Complete’ screen to finish the service provider side configuration.
Navigating through the tabs in the management UI will show that all the required components are now deployed and registered.
We have now completed the appliance configuration in service provider side. Next is to configure appropriate NAT/firewall rules so that tenants can connect to your new cloud service.
Note: If you are using single Public IP for your entire vCloud Extender service, the Firewall/NAT configuration is a bit tricky. Below spreadsheet can help you in creating what rules you need to have in place in case of single public ip.
In case if outbound internet traffic from your vCloud Extender network is blocked on firewall, you need to open following traffic in Outbound direction.
And that’s it for this post.
For a step by step service provider setup, you can also watch below video by Daniel Paluszek
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