VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 continues to support one of the most popular and powerful load balancer, VMware Avi Load Balancer. When you deploy a new VMware Avi Load Balancer within a given VCF Domain, by default SDDC Manager will deploy three VMware Avi Controllers for high availability purposes.
For lab purposes, you may not need all three VMware Avi Controllers but there was no way to change the system default in earlier releases of VCF. With VCF 9.0, we now have way to deploy just a single VMware Avi Controller, which is fantastic for lab and testing purposes.
Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, use only within a lab environment.
Step 1 - Download your desired version of the VMware Avi Load Balancer OVA (e.g. controller-31.1.1-9122.ova) from the Broadcom Support Portal.
Step 2 - Upload the VMware Avi OVA to SDDC Manager to make it aware of the Avi Bundle. Please refer to the Broadcom documentation HERE that provides a nice script that will upload the VMware Avi OVA along with the required Product Version Catalog and Signature file, which you will also need to download.
Step 3 - SSH to SDDC Manager and add the following configuration to /home/vcf/feature.properties
feature.vcf.vgl-41078.alb.single.node.cluster=true
We now need to restart the SDDC Manager services by running the following command:
echo 'y' | /opt/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/scripts/cli/sddcmanager_restart_services.sh
Step 4 - Use the deploy_one_node_nsx_alb.ps1 PowerShell script to deploy the single VMware Avi Controller as the SDDC Manager UI has hardcoded the three controller requirement, make sure to update the script with your own configuration before running as shown in the screenshot below:
You can monitor the progress of the VMware Avi deployment by using the SDDC Manager UI
As you can see from the screenshot below, our VMware Avi cluster is just a single node versus the three that is deployed by default!
now that is a really cool feature! 👏
I would like to inquire about replacing the NSX Load Balancer with AVI in a VPC within VMware Cloud Foundation. Could you please advise on the recommended approach, or provide any SOPs or reference documentation for this process?
thank you 🙂
Please see https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-security-load-balancing/avi-load-balancer/avi-load-balancer-vmware-cloud-foundation/9-0/deploying-avi-load-balancer-in-vcf.html
Is there documentation for how to build clusters within a supervisor namespace that is on NSX VPCs + Avi Load balancers? I'm struggling to find how to construct the yaml files for a test cluster, before we rework them for a helm chart, and I'm seeing an error similar to "virtualmachine service lb does not have vip assigned virtual machine service does not have ingresses"
have same issue
When you say build a cluster, are you referring to deploying a vSphere Kubernetes Cluster?
Yes - I think I’m past the error I had before, but now it’s just weird. It’s building the VKS Cluster inside the namespace I made, and I see the services and pools come up in Avi, but then go red after the cluster control plane node comes online. Everything in NSX seems to be provisioned as well with the VPC l.
It feels like it’s almost there but I’m missing something simple that’s not in the documentation. Not sure if it’s NSX VPC, or Avi, or I need to build the namespace with a custom network or what.
Would you mind if I connected you directly with a couple of experts in this area offline?
I think I’m past it now, working with some folks the TAM got aligned with yesterday and today - thanks though!
Not sure exact issue because I did a lot of stuff to try to get it fixed - definitely the Avi management segment in NSX not having DHCP addresses contributed though