vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager enables you to manage your products that you already have up and running. You can perform host of operations like scale out, upgrade, patch, snapshots, manage certificates etc. from a single pane of glass. To be able to do so, you need to either deploy new products or import your existing products into vRSLCM i.e. Brownfield Import. At times things may not unfold as you would have liked due to other environmental issues.
This blog focuses on Brownfield Import and we will discuss few things that should be taken care when you want to perform a brownfield import into vRSLCM.
Things to consider before Import
Before you start managing your products using vRSLCM, you need to import them. There are few things that you should check before starting import:
- Make sure your product is up and running as expected and other nodes/components are connected properly.
- The components/nodes of the product might be scattered across different geographies.
For e.g. Remote Collectors might be deployed in different vCenter.Keep the list of vCenters handy where your setup is deployed.
- Check if the FQDN of the product’s Master node is reachable from vRSLCM.
- Check if the FQDN’s of all the nodes are correctly visible in vCenter. If the vCenter doesn’t have FQDN and shows only hostname without the domain, importing this product into vRSLCM will be incomplete and future Day2 operations may fail.Please refer to below images for reference.
Incorrect FQDN
If your vCenter shows DNS name without domain name as shown above but the VM has correct FQDN , then vCenter is not able to detect the correct hostname.
Many times just restarting your virtual appliance resolves this. Try that and check the DNS name in vCenter again.
Correct FQDN
Things to consider during Import
If you have verified that the product is in good health and vCenter also has all correct details, proceed for importing the setup in vRSLCM. You can do this via Create Environment flow by selecting Import option. Few things to keep in mind while you import are:
- Make sure you provide correct FQDN and credentials as asked in the wizard.
Select the vCenter where the Master node resides.
- DO NOT forget to add all the vCenters where other components of the product reside like Remote Collectors, Worker nodes etc. You can do by clicking +ADD ANOTHER.
If the vCenter is not available in the list, close this wizard by Save & Exit and add the missing vCenter to the datacenter first.
Starting vRSLCM 2.0, the import wizard has been simplified and the steps have been reduced to just one. This has made your Brownfield Import much easier, as in the older versions you had to enter host of other information which was a bit tedious.
Things to validate after import
Once the import is successful, make sure all the necessary details are captured by vRSLCM.You can do this by clicking “View Details” on the Environment and the corresponding product cards.
- Validate all the nodes are coming in View Details.
- Validate the hostnames of all the nodes is in FQDN format.
- Validate that all vCenter related information like the cluster , esxHost, network etc. is shown correctly for each node.
BINGO ! If you have considered all above points, your environment is ready with all necessary information. Go ahead and try Day 2 operations like Scale Out, Upgrade, Snapshot etc.
Make sure to run the Pre-Checks provided for different operations like upgrade, scale out etc. These checks will warn you with any other issue that may have crept in the product after the import was successful.
Conclusion
When we say managing products using vRSLCM, there are host of things that can be done. This list keeps increasing with every release of vRSLCM. All these actions involve interactions with different appliances, vCenters etc. So, it is very important to have all this information correct in your environment within vRSLCM because this is used for all the actions that you will perform later to manage your products. And of course you don’t want any glitches then.
Thank you !
