In a previous post I set up the MSSQL server required for my vCloud Director 9.5 lab that I will then use to migrate to a vCloud Director 10 Appliance with embedded postgres DB.

In this post I continue with the setup of the Linux cell.

Procedure

I will use Cent OS. My proposed cell will have the following spec:

• 2 vCPU
• 4GB RAM
• 20GB HDD
• 1 vNIC with 2 IPs
  • IP1 172.16.50.18/24 – Used for HTTP Access
  • IP2 172.16.50.19/24 – Used for Console Proxy

In a production environment when deciding the size and number of cells pay attention to design guidelines as per the 9.5 release notes.
The full procedure for installing a Linux based deployment is listed in the documentation. For the purpose of the lab I have distilled the procedure down to that used below.

Preparation

Create DNS entries for the cell(S). Both an A Record and PTR are required. The names I have chosen here are only for this lab.

sto-vcd95-01.terataki.local 172.16.50.18
sto-vcd95proxy-01.terataki.local 172.16.50.19

Install and Set Up Network

Install Cent OS onto the blank VM and log in.

Once complete log in and open Network manager

# nmtui

Once this opens chose “Edit connection” and then Enter. Type in the relevant details for the deployment.

Verify the current IP configuration

# ip addr show

As this is a lab I wont be using the Cent OS firewall so I disabled this by stopping the FirewallD service

# systemctl stop firewall 

Then to stop the FirewallD service from starting automatically on reboot

# systemctl disable firewalld

Enable SSH

Before enabling SSH it was required to download and install the relevant packages.

# sudo yum –y install openssh-server openssh-clients

To start SSH

# systemctl start sshd

To check the status of SSH

# systemctl status sshd

Here SSH would not be automatically enabled in the event of a reboot. In order for SSH to start automatically

# systemctl enable sshd

Installing required packages

vCloud Director requires a number of different packages be installed on the cell. These are listed in the official documentation under Required Linux Software Packages.

# sudo yum install alsa-lib bash chkconfig coreutils findutils glibc grep initscripts krb5-libs libgcc libICE libSM libstdc++ libX11 libXau libXdmcp libXext libXi libXt libXtst module-init-tools net-tools pciutils procps redhat-lsb sed tar wget which

Download the VMware Public Key

On the cell I created a directory in order to store the VMware Public Key. This allows the installer to check the installer bin file which has been digitally signed by VMware.

# mkdir /install

Download the VMware public key from http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys and save the key files to the /install directory created above on the cell.

Then import the key

# rpm --import /install/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub

The official documentation on Downloading and installing the VMware public key

Download and Install vCloud Director

I downloaded the latest version 9.5 build and used WinSCP to copy it over to the vCD cell in the install directory I created earlier.

Change the permissions on the newly copied file

# chmod u+x vmware-vcloud-director-distribution-9.5.0.15631706.bin

Now run the installer

# ./vmware-vcloud-director-distribution-9.5.0.15631706.bin

Once the initial install has occurred we can choose to continue with the post install configuration or come back later. At this point it is worth jumping to another window and setting up the NFS mount point.

Certificates

For this lab I am going to use Self signed certificates, one for http and one for the console. It was easier to jump over to another SSH session in order to carry this out.

http self signed certificate generation:

# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -keystore certificates.ks  -storetype JCEKS -storepass VMware123! -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias http 
(VMware123! is the password I am using for the keystore). 

Enter all the relevant information in for the certificate

Console self signed certificate generation:

# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -keystore certificates.ks  -storetype JCEKS -storepass VMware123! -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias consoleproxy 
(VMware123! is the password I am using for the keystore)

Enter all the relevant information in for the certificate

Having generated the certificates I needed to install them

# ./keytool -storetype JCEKS -storepass VMware123! -keystore certificates.ks -importcert -alias http -file http.cer 
(VMware123! is the password I am using for the keystore)

# ./keytool -storetype JCEKS -storepass VMware123! -keystore certificates.ks -importcert -alias consoleproxy -file consoleproxy.cer 
(VMware123! is the password I am using for the keystore)

To check that the certificates installed correctly run the following command

# ./keytool -storetype JCEKS -storepass VMware123! -keystore certificates.ks -list 
(VMware123! is the password I am using for the keystore)

Continuing with the install in the original SSH session it asks for the location of the private keys.

private keys: /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/certificates.ks 

Continuing with setting up the connection to the vcloud database within Microsoft SQL which was set up earlier.

Select option 2 for Microsoft SQL Server,
Enter the hostname or in this case IP 172.16.50.3
Enter in the database name vcloud
Enter my username (vcloud) and password vcloudpass that has full access to the vcloud6 database.

All being well the configuration will complete and the services can be started if desired. If so press Y.