Recommended Procedure for resizing Cloud Director Appliances

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

VMware Validated Designs provide a comprehensive and prescriptive framework for the establishment and management of a software-defined data center. These designs incorporate a range of VMware products and solutions to create a standardized and validated architecture that aligns with industry best practices.

The VMware Cloud Director appliance offers four size options during deployment: Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large (VVS).

Details on these sizes can be found here.

For Telco production environments that require API integrations and monitoring, it is essential to select the Extra Large size. API integrations include orchestration tools such as Nokia CBAM.

This document will provide you with the necessary steps to resize your Appliances.

Resolution

1. Login to the Primary Appliance VAMI and take a backup of the Cloud Director Appliance Postgres Embedded Database.
   
   
2. If your Appliances are powered on, take snapshots in vCenter of the Cloud Director Appliances with memory. Memory snapshots take longer to create, but allow reversion to a running virtual machine state as it was when the snapshot was taken.
   
   Note: An overview of virtual machine snapshots in vSphere can be found here.
   
   
3. If you wish to take cold snapshots, SSH to each of the appliances and execute the following as root to stop any further tasks being processed. You will be notified when quiescing is complete.
   
   

   /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool cell -i `cat /var/run/vmware-vcd-cell.pid` -t --quiesce true

4. Next, stop the Appliance Services:
   
   

   /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool cell -i `cat /var/run/vmware-vcd-cell.pid` --shutdown

5. In vCenter where the Cloud Director Appliances are located, power down the Appliance VMs.
   
   
6. Edit the properties of the Appliance VMs and increase the CPU and RAM of the Appliances to 24CPU and 32GB RAM.
   
   
7. Once the changes have been made, power the Appliances back on.
   
   
8. Wait 5-10 minutes for the services to come up and for repmgr to finish synchronising the Postgres Database state between the Appliances.
   
   
9. During this process, login to the Primary Appliance VAMI again and check the cluster status.
   
   
10. If the cluster status is anything other than Healthy, please open a case with Broadcom support.