vCloud Director Appliance Installation Best Practices

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

With the release of vCloud Director for Service Providers 9, a vCloud Appliance has been released for production use. The release of the appliance has brought some subtle changes to the installation requirements. This KB article will list them below.

Symptoms:

New installations of vCloud Director, using the vCloud Director appliance, are failing in unexpected ways.

Environment

VMware Cloud Director for Service Provider 10.x

Cause

1. The installation GUI has several fields that seem to be trivial, but require proper values or the appliance will fail to install. This includes the administrator's email field. Please make certain all fields are filled in completely.
2. The VCD appliance currently requires the two NICs to be on differing subnets. Placing both NICs on the same subnet will result in the appliance failing to install correctly.
3. At this point, it is not recommended to add additional NICs to the appliance. 
4. It is recommended to use wildcard certificates unless the installation is for a test environment which will never have more than a single appliance attached. Make certain to configure a SAN for the certificate, and place the keystore in /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer. Subsequent appliances failing to find the keystore during the initial boot will result in the appliance failing to install correctly.

Resolution

Following the above steps should minimize the risk for the appliance failing to install 

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:
Even if the appliance appears to install successfully, any of the above can cause firstboot to fail. this will result in vCloud Director to not function properly. The only resolution at this point would be to delete and reinstall the appliance.