Building a VMware Cloud Foundation Lab: Part 2 – DNS and IP Pools

When you are planning for a vCF deployment, you need lot and lot of IP’s and DNS records. 

In my environment I have an AD integrated DNS running on MS 2012 R2.

If you are only planning on deploying the Management Workload Domain in your environment you only need to create the forward and reverse lookup records for Management Workload Domain. If Virtual Infrastructure Workload Domain will be introduced in future then you need to plan the DNS records accordingly.

Note: Please see this article for comprehensive list of DNS requirement for vCF deployment.

Below is the list of DNS records that I created in my environment:

Workload Domain Hostname IP Address
Management vcfesx01 172.20.31.101
Management vcfesx02 172.20.31.102
Management vcfesx03 172.20.31.103
Management vcfesx04 172.20.31.104
Management vcf-psc01 172.20.31.105
Management vcf-psc02 172.20.31.106
Management vcf-mgmtvc 172.20.31.107
Management vcf-mgmtnsx 172.20.31.108
Management vcf-sddcmgr 172.20.31.109
Management vcfvrli (iLB) 172.20.31.110
Management vcf-vrli01 172.20.31.111
Management vcf-vrli02 172.20.31.112
Management vcf-vrli03 172.20.31.113
Virtual Infrastructure wld-esxi01 172.20.31.165
Virtual Infrastructure wld-esxi02 172.20.31.166
Virtual Infrastructure wld-esxi03 172.20.31.167
Virtual Infrastructure vcf-wldvc01 172.20.31.168
Virtual Infrastructure vcf-wldnsx01 172.20.31.169
NA vcf (cloud builder appliance) 172.20.31.100
NA vcf-lcm 172.20.31.118

Note: If you are planning to deploy vRealize and Horizon infrastructure using vCF, you need to create additional records as per product DNS requirement. 

IP Pools

IP pools are needed to configure vMotion network, vSAN network etc during SDDC bring up process. Typically you need to have pool of IP’s reserved for following:

  • vMotion pool for Esxi hosts in Management Domain and VI Workload Domain.
  • vSAN pool for Esxi hosts in Management Domain and VI Workload Domain.
  • NSX controller pool in Management Domain and VI Workload Domain.

Here is how the IP pools looks like in my environment:

Pool Type Pool Start Address Pool End Address
NSX-CTLR Pool (Mgmt) 172.20.31.114 172.20.31.116
vMotion-Pool (Mgmt) 172.20.31.125 172.20.31.128
vSAN-Pool (Mgmt) 172.20.31.129 172.20.31.132
Wld-vMotion-Pool 172.20.31.169 172.20.31.171
Wld-vSAN-Pool 172.20.31.172 172.20.31.174
NSX-CTLR Pool (WLD) 172.20.31.175 172.20.31.177

Note: Ideally its better to have your mgmt, vMotion, vSAN networks backed by different VLAN’s. In my lab I had some issues when trying to use IP’s from different VLAN’s, so I put everything on same L2 network.

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