VMware vCloud Director – Cloud Resources – Part 6

VMware vCloud Director – vCloud Cloud Resources

We now return back to vCloud Director to continue with the configuration. In this article we will focus on:

• Attaching a vCenter Server
• Creating a Provider VDC
• Creating an external network

Before we continue, I have created a Resource Pool within the vCloud Cluster called vCloud_RP. This will be referenced in step 7. I have also created a port-group on my distributed switch called External-vCloud with vlan 40, this will be referenced in step 12.

vCloud Director – Attaching a vCenter Server

1. Browse to your VMware vCloud Director URL http://vcloud6director1.vmlab.local/cloud and login with your adminstrator account

2. Click on Attach a vCenter. Etner in your vCenter DNS or IP address, User Name and Password, give your vCenter a name and finally click on Use the following URL and enter in your vSphere Web Client URL. (The vCenter Name can be seen later on in System – Manage & Monitor – vSphere Resources – vCenters)

3. Enter the IP address, username and password to your VMware NSX controller.

4. The Ready to Complete screen is displayed. Review your settings and click Finish.

5. We now have a green tick next to Attach another vCenter.

vCloud Director – Creating a Provider VDC

6. Click on Create a Provider VDC. Give the Provider VDC a name, description, click enabled and select Hardware Version 10.

7. Select the vCenter Server on the left hand side, on the right hand side select the resource pool we created earlier, vCloud_RP.

8. We will add all 4 tiers of storage to the this Provider VDC. Select all 4 tiers from the top window followed by clicking on Add.

9. This step will install the vCloud Director agent on each host selected. We have the option of using one credential for all hosts, or you can specific individual credentials for each host.

10. A summary of your settings is presented in this window. Click Finish.

11. The green light has now appeared next to Create another Provider VDC as well as Create another network pool. At this point vCloud Director has created a Network Pool called VMLAB pVDC-VXLAN-NP. This network pool is spread across all hosts. If you are familiar with vShield and NSX, a network pool is referred to as a Transport Zone.

vCloud Director – Creating an External Network

12. Next up is creating an external network. Click on Create an external network. Select your vCenter server on the left hand side and select External-vCloud on the right hand side.

13. Click on Add.

14. My External Network subnet is 10.40.0.0/24. My default gateway for this network will be 10.40.0.1. On a side note a colleague of mine said do you know how to tell if a network or server guy configured the network settings ? The network guy will make the default gateway .1 and the windows guy will make it .254 🙂 Anyway, moving onw.. I enter in 10.40.0.1 as my gateway address, my network mask is 255.255.255.0 and primary dns is 8.8.8.8. I will configure a block of external IP’s that I can use to allocated to NSX edge gateways once I start deploying Organisation VDC’s. The Static IP Pool I will allocated to my Provider VDC is 10.40.0.10-10.40.0.19, click Add and Ok.

15. The Static IP Pool has now been added into the configuration.

16. Give the external network a name and description.

17. The New External Network wizard is now complete. Click Finish.

18. All lights are now green on the left side.

Disclaimer:
All the tutorials included on this site are performed in a lab environment to simulate a real world production scenario. As everything is done to provide the most accurate steps to date, we take no responsibility if you implement any of these steps in a production environment.