This part of the lab is presented as a Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation. This will allow you to experience steps which are too time-consuming or resource intensive to do live in the lab environment. In this simulation, you can use the software interface as if you are interacting with a live environment.
The orange boxes show where to click, and the left and right arrow keys can also be used to move through the simulation in either direction.
Begin at the SDDC Manager Dashboard.
- Click ADD WORKLOAD DOMAIN
- Click Configure VI
- At the VI Configuration screen we provide a name for the VI workload domain.
- Click in the Virtual Infrastructure Name box
- Enter Virtual Infrastructure Name: TMM-01
- Click in the Organization Name box
- Enter Organization Name: VMware
- Click the scroll bar
- Click NEXT
- Next, we set the availability policy for the workload domain. The "NONE" setting does not provide any redundancy or failover (used for test/dev workloads), the "NORMAL" setting will set the vSAN failures to tolerate (FTT) setting to 1 and enables vSphere HA on the cluster (used for most production workloads). the "HIGH" setting sets the vSAN FTT to 2 and enables vSphere HA (used for sensitive workloads that require the highest levels of availability). Note that the "HIGH" setting requires a minimum of 5 hosts in the workload domain.
- Click NORMAL
- In the sections that follow we will configure IP addresses and subnets for the management, vMotion, vSAN and VXLAN networks. As these networks are private to the workload domain, we can simplify the deployment and reduce the number of inputs required by checking the USE ALL DEFAULT NETWORKS box to have SDDC Manager configure default network settings.
- Click the checkbox next to USE ALL DEFAULT NETWORKS
- Click NEXT
- Click the scroll bar
- Here we choose the ESXi hosts that will be assigned to the workload domain. A minimum of three hosts is required, however, to provide for an added measure of redundancy and to facilitate cluster maintenance we will select four hosts.
- Click the host R1N4
- Click the host R1N5
- Click the host R1N6
- Click the host R1N7
- Click the scroll bar
- Click NEXT
- Click on the scroll bar
- On the Data Center Connections screen we specify how the workload domain will connect to the data center network. We can choose to use an existing uplink, or to create a new uplink. Here we will use an existing uplink that was configured for us during bring-up.
- Click the Select Data Center Configuration drop-down
- Click PUBLIC
- Here we see the VLAN ID along with the IP address and subnet information.
- Click the scroll bar to scroll down and review the network settings
- Click NEXT
- At the Configuration Review page, we are able to review the settings for this workload domain.
- Click the scroll bar four times to scroll down and review the settings
- Click FINISH
- Click CONFIRM
- We are notified that a workflow has been triggered to create our Virtual Infrastructure workload domain.
- Click OK
- The workload domain creation begins and the tasks are executed in the background by SDDC Manager. We can monitor the progress by navigating to the STATUS view.
- Click STATUS
- Here we see a summary of the Alerts an Events.
- Click the scroll bar to move the page down
- Here we see a summary of the Workflow Tasks. It's here that we are able to view the workflows and monitor the sub-tasks.
- Click VIEW DETAILS
- We see that the "VI Resource Pool - TMM-01 workflow" is active.
- Click on the workflow to expand it
- Click the scroll bar to scroll down the page
- We see an overview of the workflow along with a summary of the sub-tasks. We see there are 51 tasks in the Pending state, 1 task in the RUNNING state and 1 task in the SUCCESSFUL state.
- It will take approximately 40 - 60 minutes for the new workload domain to be created.
- Click View Sub-Tasks
- Here we see workflow has completed successfully. We can click the scroll bar to scroll the sub-tasks that make up the workflow.
- Click the scroll bar three times to scroll down and review a subset of the completed sub-tasks
- With the workflow complete, the workload domain has been created. We can return to the dashboard to view the newly created VI workload domain.
- Click DASHBOARD to return to the dashboard view
- Click VIEW DETAILS under Workload Domain
- Click the scroll bar to scroll down the page
- Here we see the TMM-01 workload domain that was just created.
- Click the TMM-01 VI Domain icon
- Here we see the general information for the VI Workload Domain, to include the type, owner, and capacity settings.
- Click the scroll bar to move back to the top of the page
- Click VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE INFO tab
- Here we see additional detail about the workload domain, such as the performance and availability settings (that we set when we created the workload domain).
- Click the scroll bar to scroll the page down and view additional network details about the domain
- Click the scroll bar to move back to the top of the page
- Click the GENERAL INFO tab
- Let's view our new workload domain in the vSphere Web Client.
- Click the scroll bar to scroll the page down
- Click the VCENTER link
- We are connected to the vSphere web client where we see the "TMM1-0-cluster" that is backing our new VI Workload Domain.
- Click the storage icon
- Here we see details about the vSAN datastore backing the VI-TMM01 Workload Domain.
- Click the network icon
- Here we see the distributed switch and associated portgroups for the VI-TMM01 Workload Domain.
- Click the Home Icon, then Network and Security
- Here we can view the NSX configuration for the Workload Domain.
- Click Installation
- On the Management tab, we see the NSX Manager instance for the workload domain and its corresponding controller cluster.
- Click the scroll bar next to the NSX Controllers to scroll down and view controller Node-3
- Click the Host Preparation Tab
- Click to expand the TMM01-0-cluster
- Here we can see that NSX has been installed, the distributed firewall is enabled, and VXLAN has been configured.
- Click Logical Network Preparation tab
- Click to expand the TMM01-0-cluster
- Here we can see that the VXLAN transports are enabled.
- Click Segment ID
- Here we can see the range of configured Segment IDs.
- Click Transport Zones
- Here we see the default transport zone "tzone" that has been created.
- This concludes our overview of the vSphere cluster backing our new TMM01 VI Workload Domain. Let's return to the SDDC manager.
- Click on the SDDC Manager tab in the web browser
- Click the Dashboard
This completes our simulation of how to create a Virtual Infrastructure Workload Domain. Here we have seen how the SDDC Manager makes it easy to deploy and manage cloud capacity through the automation of workload domains, to include deploying and configuring the underlying vSphere cluster, setting up the associated vSAN datastore and deploying and configuring NSX.
To return to the lab, click the link in the top right corner or close this browser tab.