VCF On VxRAIL 3.9.1 – Walkthrough

Note: this is an example for reference only please use the VxRail installation procedures & services provided by Dell.

The following detailed post provides an example walkthrough covering the process of:

Deploying a VxRail Management Workload Domain cluster
Deploying VMware CloudBuilder for VxRail
Bring up of VCF
Deploying a VxRail Virtual Infrastructure NSX-T Based Workload Domain cluster
Deploying vRSLCM
Deploying vROPs

Versions used in this example are VCF 3.9.1 & VxRail 4.7.410.

The end result of this example build is that of a single site VCF on VxRail solution including a single NSX-T VI Workload Domain (thanks to @HeagaSteve for the architectural diagram):

Management Workload Domain Creation

The VxRail bring-up of the Management Cluster is similar to a standard VxRail bring-up with embedded vCenter and PSC being deployed, selecting None for Logging as vRealize Log Insight is deployed later in the Management Workload Domain during the VCF Bring-Up process. Tasks include:

VxRail Mgmt WLD cluster bring-up
Enable Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)
Externalize the vCenter using VxRail Manager plugin from the vCenter HTML client
Test the cluster shut down command to confirm externalization was successful
Change the Management port group to Ephemeral port type
Rename DC, Cluster, VDS, vSAN

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Deploy CloudBuilder

VMware Cloud Builder OVA downloaded from VMware.com and deployed:

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VCF Bring-Up

The following section details the VCF on VxRail Bring-Up. At this stage the Cloud Builder VM has been deployed, powered on and user logged into the Cloud Builder UI, from here you proceed as follow:

Download the parameter Sheet from Cloud Builder
Populate the Parameter sheet based on network and environment specifics
Validate the Parameter sheet values

3.9.1 introduced the concept of Application Virtual Networks (AVNs), below is a screen capture of the parameter sheet including the required AVN entries and BGP Peering details:

Before proceeding with the VCF bring-up it is good practice to create snapshots of the following virtual machines in the result that a rollback is required:

VMware vCenter Server Appliance
VMware vCenter Server Platform Services Controller
VMware Cloud Builder
VxRail Manager

During bring-up the following components are automatically deployed and configured:

Additional PSC
Log Insight Cluster
SDDC Manager
NSX Manager and Controller cluster

On completion of VCF Bring-up we review the Management Domain VMs created in vCenter by the VCF Bring-Up process including AVN and confirm automatic IP assignment from the DHCP IP pool for the NSX-V Virtual Tunnel Endpoints (VTEPs).

Coud Builder generates a JSON file for the management cluster from the uploaded config file, this vcf-vxrail.json file can be found in:

/opt/vmware/sddc-support/cloud_admin_tools/Resources/vcf-vxrail/

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NSX-T VI Workload Domain Creation

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Deploy vRSLCM

You will notice that vRSLCM & vROPs get deployed to the AVN ‘Mgmt-xRegion01-VXLAN-VRA’ which was created as part of the VCF bring-up process highlighted earlier: