To make
VMware vCloud Director failure proof and more resilient you would need to
install more than one vCloud cell. But to have the best experience you need to
put a load balancer in front of them, this way you have just a single cloud name to access and configure it on others systems, leaving the load balancer taking care of directing the connections
to each cell.
While most
of the load balancer on the marketing are supposed to work with vCloud, as long
as they support persistent SSL connections and SSL passthrough mode, there are clients which dont have any Load Balancer or even don’t realize that vCloud comes with a viable option, vCNS Edge, it’s part of vCloud Suite License, so no extra costs associated with this
implementation.
Let’s see
how we can implement vCNS Edge to work as a Load Balancer for vCloud.
This first
post will be how to deploy vCNS Edge, which depends on the vCNS Manager.
If you
don’t have vCNS Manager working already, go back to this post and learn how to deploy it.
- On the
Home page of vCenter click on vShield
Icon
- Expand
the Folder Datacenters and select
the Datacenter where vCNS Edge will be deployed
- Select
the Network Virtualization tab and
the click on the PLUS sign to create a new Edge
- Give it a
Name and a description, also to make it more reliable enable HA and click Next
Edge HA is NOT the same as Fault Tolerance or vCenter HA, it's more a kind of a clustering solution, if you want
to learn more about Edge HA here you can find more information.
- Set a
password for Admin account and click Next
- Select
the Appliance Size, I recommend Large, enable Auto Rule Generation and then click on the plus sign to set up
where Edge will be created
If you want more information about Edge Size, check KB2042799
- Specify
Cluster, Datastore, Host and Folder than click Add
- Click on
the PLUS sign to configure the vCNS Edge interfaces
vCNS Edge can have up to 10 NICs so you can spread your traffic over them, I recommend one for Management and one for the vCloud Load Balanced traffic.
- Give it a
Name, click on Change to select what
Portgroup it will be connect to and then click on the PLUS sign to attribute
it’s IP and Subnet
Remember: the VIP for vCloud HTTP and Remote Console will need to be configure first on the Edge before you can set up your Load Balance rules.
- Click on
the plus sign to add the IP information.
The Primary IP is the one used to manage
the appliance.
- Configure
it’s Default Gateway and click Next
- Configure
the Firewall, if you choose the default rule to Deny you will need to manually
configure the ports allowed later, it’s up to you. Click Next
Also you
could set up a different NIC and IPs for the vCNS Edge HA to communicate.
In favor of
simplicity I do not specify anything, this way HA will use the primary NIC for
heartbeat.
- If
everything is correct, click Finish
Once it’s
deployed we can start using it.
Next post I
will show you how to configure the Load Balance rules for vCloud Connector…
Stay Tunned
; )
