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.
The simulation is starting out at the VMware VIA imaging appliance user interface, where the rack imaging process has just been completed.
We begin by connecting to the SDDC Manager Bring up user interface:
- Click the link to bring up the SDDC Manager User Interface
- Enter the username administrator@vsphere.local
- Enter the password vmware1234
- Click Login
- On first login, SDDC Manager performs a discovery of the rack.
- Click Continue
- Use the calendar to set the date, time, and timezone.
- Click SET TIME
- SDDC Manager synchronizes the date & time across all components in the rack.
- View the components that have been synchronized
- Click Continue
- SDDC Manager then performs a Power On System Validation. Here, checks are done to verify the inventory is complete and all components are accessible.
- Verify the system validation completes successfully.
- Click Continue
- With the time synchronized and the Power-On System Validation complete, we are now ready to select which hosts to use for the management workload domain.
- The primary host (R1N0) is selected by default, add three additional hosts to meet the 4-hosts requirement.
- Click on R1N1
- Click on R1N2
- Click on R1N3
- Click Continue
- We are now ready to begin the deployment of the SDDC software components
- Click Start Deployment
- Click AGREE to accept the EULA
- Click NEXT
- We are prompted to create a super-user account. This account will have administrator privileges. It is created to help avoid the over-use of a generic administrator account when administering Cloud Foundation.
- Click in the new user box
- Enter the New User Name: sddc-admin
- Click in the new password box
- Enter the password: VMware1!
- Click in the confirm password box
- Enter the password: VMware1!
- Click NEXT
- We start by providing general setup details such as the rack name, company name, DNS and SSO domain settings.
- Click in the physical rack name box
- Enter the Physical Rack Name: VCF-Rack-01
- Click in the Company Name box
- Enter the Company Name: VMware
- Click in the Company Department box
- Enter the Department Name: SDDC
- Click in the Root DNS Domain box
- Enter the Root DNS Domain: vmware.com
- Click in the VMware Cloud Foundation sub-domain box
- Enter the Cloud Foundation Sub-Domain: sddc.vmware.com
- Click in the SSO domain box
- Enter the SSO Domain: vsphere.local
- Click the scroll bar down
- Note: you can optionally enter your Cloud Foundation license key. You can also enter license keys later using the vSphere Web Client.
- Click NEXT
- Next, we provide the required network configuration parameters.
- Click in the VLAN ID box
- Enter the VLAN ID: 200
- Click in the Subnet box
- Enter the Subnet: 10.0.20.0
- Click in the Subnet Mask box
- Enter the Subnet Mask: 255.255.252.0
- Click in the Gateway box
- Enter the Gateway: 10.0.20.1
- Click in the Primary DNS box
- Enter the Primary DNS: 192.168.100.40
- For a production deployment, you would typically provide both a primary and secondary DNS. However, for this demo, we are only using a primary DNS so we will skip the step to enter a Secondary DNS.
- Click in the NTP box
- Enter the address: 192.168.100.40
- Click the scroll bar on the right to scroll down the page
- Here we can exclude IP addresses on this subnet from SDDC Manager control.
- Click USE DEFAULTS
- This populates a set of default network values for vMotion, vSAN, and VXLAN, as you'll see in the next three screens.
- Click NEXT
- Click NEXT
- Click NEXT
- Click NEXT
- Here we provide the network details that will be used to uplink the Cloud Foundation instance to the data center network.
- Click in the VLAN ID box
- Enter VLAN ID: 204
- Click in the Subnet box
- Enter Subnet: 10.0.40.0
- Click in the Subnet Mask box
- Enter Subnet Mask: 255.255.252.0
- Click in the Gateway box
- Enter Gateway: 10.0.40.1
- Click the scroll bar down
- Here we can exclude IP addresses on this subnet from SDDC Manager control.
- Click NEXT
- On the Data Center Uplink page we specify the type of connection and indicate the ports on the Top-of-Rack switches that will be used.
- Click the drop-down next to Uplink Type
- Select Uplink Type: L2
- Click to Enable Uplink LAG
- Click in the Uplink Ports box
- Enter Uplink Ports: 43,44,45,46
- Click the drop-down next to Uplink speed
- Select Uplink Speed: 10Gbps
- Click NEXT
- Click the scroll bar down and review the inputs
- The Bring-up process will take approximately 90-120 minutes.
- SDDC Manager will perform approximately 120 separate tasks during Bring-up, including configuring Top-of-Rack switches, deploying and configuring a management vCenter server instance, configuring IP addresses for the ESXi hosts, instantiating the management cluster, and deploying and configuring vSAN, HA, DRS, virtual distributed switch, NSX, and vRealize Log Insight.
- Click Finish
- Here we see that bring-up has completed successfully.
- Click the See IP Allocation hyperlink
- We see the IP addresses that were assigned for each of the components of the SDDC.
- Click the scroll bar to review the assigned IPs
- With bring-up complete, we are now ready to connect to the SDDC Manager portal to begin managing our private cloud.
- Click Proceed to Dashboard to be transferred to the SDDC manager Portal
- Enter the New User Name that we created during bring up: sddc-admin@vsphere.local
- Click in the password box
- Enter the password: VMware1!
- Click LOGIN
- At the SDDC Manager Dashboard, we are able to see a summary of physical resources in our rack along with the configured virtual resources.
- Click the scroll bar to see the current Resources allocation in our private cloud.
- Here we see a summary of the available CPU, Memory and storage resources in our private cloud along with a breakdown of the allocated vs available capacity.
- Click the scroll bar to go back to the top of the page
- In the Workload Domains section, click VIEW DETAILS
- Click the scroll bar to scroll down
- Here we see the Management Workload Domain that was created during bring-up.
- Click the MGMT Management Domain icon
- Click the scroll bar to scroll down
- View the details about the management domain. Here we see the summary of hosts assigned to this domain (4) along with the total CPU, Memory and storage capacity.
- Click the slide bar to scroll back up to the top of the screen
- Click the MANAGEMENT INFO tab
- Click the scroll bar to scroll down
- Here we are able to view additional details about the Management Workload domain, such as the deployed component VMs, and the assigned IP addresses. Notice that links are available to launch the separate product UIs directly from SDDC Manager.
- Click the scroll bar to scroll down
- Here we see the network configuration for the workload domain.
- Click the scroll bar to scroll back up to the top of the screen
- Click the GENERAL INFO tab to return to the General Info
- Click the scroll bar to scroll down
- Here we can see a link to the vCenter Server instance used to manage our Management Workload Domain.
- Click the VCENTER link
- The vCenter link provides launch-in-context to the vSphere Web Client. Here we can view a summary of the Management Workload Domain
- Click to expand the vRack-Cluster
- Here we can see the four hosts that make up the management domain, along with three resource pools that have been created for us as part of bring-up.
- Click the SDDC-Management Resource pool to expand the inventory.
- Click the scroll bar in the vCenter inventory window to scroll down and view the list of virtual machines that were deployed during bring-up.
- Click the home icon and select Storage
- Click the vsanDatastore
- Here we see the capacity information for the dedicated vSAN datastore that was automatically created for the management workload domain
- Click the Home icon and then Networking
- Here we see details about the distributed switch and associated port groups that were created for the management workload domain.
- Click Home icon and then Networking and Security to view the NSX configuration
- Here we can see the NSX Manager instance and its corresponding controller cluster
- Click the scroll bar next to the NSX controllers to scroll down
- Click the scroll bar next to the NSX controllers to scroll back up
- Click the Host Preparation Tab
- Click vRack-Cluster to expand the cluster details
- Here we can see that NSX has been installed, and the distributed firewall enabled, and VXLAN configured
- Click Logical Network Preparation Tab
- Click to expand the vRack-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 "transportzone-1" that has been created
- Click the Home icon and then Host and Clusters
- We return to the host and clusters view in the vSphere Web Client
- Click on the VMware Cloud Foundation tab in the web browser
- We return to the SDDC Manager
This completes our overview of the SDDC Manager Bring-Up process. Here we see how the SDDC Manager automates the configuration of the full SDDC software stack to include deploying and configuring vSphere, setting up vSAN and deploying and configuring NSX. The private cloud is now ready to use.
To return to the lab, click the link in the top right corner or close this browser tab.