WilliamLam.com

Increasing VCF Installer & SDDC Manager Timeout for NSX Deployment

by // 2 Comments

For resource constrained environments, deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) can take longer, especially when deploying on top of a Nested ESXi configuration. However, the VCF Installer does provide a robust retry function that typically will resolve most intermediate issues.

With that said, for environments that are more resource constrained, you may notice the NSX Manager component fails to complete its initialization within the default timeout period. Users can increase the timeout by adding nsxt.manager.wait.minutes to increase the time out (minutes) that VCF Installer / SDDC Manager will wait for NSX to be ready.

echo "nsxt.manager.wait.minutes=180" >> /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties
echo 'y' | /opt/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/scripts/cli/sddcmanager_restart_services.sh

Note: SDDC Manager is responsible for deploying NSX, so the setting above should be applied to SDDC Manager. The default behavior of the VCF Installer is to switch to the SDDC Manager function, which means the setting above is actually applied to the VCF Installer unless you are overriding this behavior within the JSON deployment file.

If you need to increase the timeout for the NSX Edge Deployment, users can add edge.node.vm.creation.max.wait.minutes to increase the time out (minutes) that VCF Installer / SDDC Manager will wait for the NSX Edge to be ready.

echo "edge.node.vm.creation.max.wait.minutes=90" >> /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties
echo 'y' | /opt/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/scripts/cli/sddcmanager_restart_services.sh

Note: Settings above are applicable for both VCF 5.x and VCF 9.x

[Read more...]

VCF 9.0 Fleet Latency Diagram

by // 2 Comments

Network latency is an important factor when designing a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Fleet and to assist VCF architects in understanding the various latency maximums, we have just published a new VCF Fleet Latency Network Diagram, which is available under the Network Diagrams on the VMware Ports & Protocols website.


While these latency represent the upper bound for component to component functionality, it is also important to understand that latency can have different types of impact based on the type of traffic: control plane (UI/API) versus data plane (binary download/uploads).

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Downloading VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Consumption CLI for Air-Gapped Environments

by // 2 Comments

Prior to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, you needed to install a custom kubectl vSphere plugin to interact with the vSphere Supervisor and deploy workloads such as vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), VM Service, and Data Services.

This custom kubectl plugin was bundled with the vSphere Supervisor release, which meant it could only be downloaded after vSphere Supervisor was enabled and a vSphere Namespace had been created, since the namespace provided the link to the hosted binary.


In VCF 9.0, the kubectl vSphere plugin has been deprecated and has been replaced with the new VCF Consumption CLI which can be used to interact with both vSphere Supervisor Namespaces and/or VCF Automation Namespaces.

[Read more...]