Intro
Welcome to Part 2 of the NSX-V Lab Series. In the previous post, we covered my lab setup.
In this post we’ll cover the deployment process for the NSX-V Manager appliance.
So lets get on with the Manager deployment.
Firstly you must ensure that you have added the NSX-V manager to your DNS server with forward and reverse lookup, I cannot stress this enough. VMware products are dependant on DNS to be fully functioning and issues will arise if they are not!
Next up we need to download the OVA file from the VMware website you’ll need the full OVA file and not the upgrade bundle for this. At the moment it is listed as NSX for vSphere 6.4.5 and is currently 2.32 GB in size.
Make sure you environment meets the system requirements and that all required ports are open.
Login to your vSphere host or vCenter server, for my lab we are using the vCenter to deploy and manage the appliance.
Right click the cluster and select ‘Deploy OVF Template’
Browse to the OVA file you downloaded earlier and click ‘Next’
Give the NSX-V manager a name, this does not have to be the FQDN then select the DC or folder and click ‘Next’
Select the resource where the manager will run, in my lab all management components will run on the physical servers which are under the Lab cluster, then click ‘Next’
Review the details and click ‘Next’
Read the license agreement in full, come back here in an hour when you are done or longer if you fall asleep then click ‘Accept’ and then ‘Next’
Now we need to select the datastore the disk format and the VM storage policy if there is one. for my lab I’ll use my iSCSI NAS and Thin Provisioning. Click ‘Next’
Select the Management network this needs to have connectivity to the hosts then click ‘Next’
Now we get into the meat of the configuration first off enter a complex password thats a minimum of 12 characters for the admin user and the CLI privilege mode these can be different or the same, for production it’s recommended to have different passwords for obvious reasons.
Enter the Manager hostname, again this does not have to be the FQDN.
Enter the IPv4 address subnet mask and default gateway. if you are using IPv6 enter those as well.
Enter the DNS server/s the domain name and NTP server/s
For the lab environment we will also enable SSH this is normally not enabled in production and would only be enabled during troubleshooting.
Finally select to join or not the VMware customer experience program then click ‘Next’
After all that we are finally ready to deploy the appliance, review the details to ensure you’ve not made any errors before clicking ‘Finish’
Once the NSX-V Manager appliance has been deployed the normal next step is to power on the VM however for my lab environment resources are critical and as such we’ll amend the VM down to a more realistic lab configuration.
Please ensure that you DO NOT do this in a production environment as VMware will not support you if you do so.
Right click the VM and select ‘Edit Settings’
Set the Reservation for Memory and CPU to 0 and change the CPU to 1 and the Memory to 5 GB and then click ‘OK’
Finally power on the VM.
Once the VM is up we can proceed to the next step.
NSX-V Lab Part:3 NSX-V Manager Initial Configuration