Starting with version 9.7, the vCloud Director appliance includes an embedded PostgreSQL database with а high availability (HA) function. Whereas vCloud Director on Linux uses an external database that needs to be installed and configured before you install vCloud Director on Linux.
You can create a vCloud Director server group by deploying one or more instances of the vCloud Director appliance with first member as a primary cell and a subsequent member as a standby or vCD application cell. You deploy the vCloud Director appliance by using the vSphere Client (HTLM5), the vSphere Web Client (Flex), or VMware OVF Tool.
This blog post describes deploying vCloud Director server group using VMware OVF Tool. You can use the Deploy OVF from vCenter to deploy the appliances using single OVA file that displays 5 different deployment configurations to choose from: Primary node (small and large), Standby node (small and large) and vCD Cell Application node. The large vCloud Director primary appliance size is suitable for production systems, while the small is suitable for lab or test systems.
For more details visit vCloud Director Installation, Configuration, and Upgrade Guide
Note **
- Mixed vCloud Director installations on Linux and vCloud Director appliance deployments in one server group are unsupported.
- The vCloud Director appliance does not support external databases.
To create deployment with a database HA cluster, we deploy one instance of the vCloud Director appliance as a primary cell, and two instances as standby cells (In this example we deploy only one standby cell). However if you have a production environment we recommend 2 standby cells deployment. vCD application cells connect to the database in the primary cell.
Recommended datastore for the appliance deployment is a vSAN datastore with redefined policy.
Next regarding network configuration, starting with version 9.7, the vCloud Director appliance is deployed with two networks, eth0 and eth1, so that you can isolate the HTTP traffic from the database traffic. Different services listen on one or both of the corresponding network interfaces. First interface eth0 is primarily used for services such as http – ports 80, 443, console proxy – port 8443, jmx – ports 61611, 61616. Second interface(eth1) is used for services such as database communication (port 5432). Both interfaces are used for services such as ssh, management UI, etc. Ensure you define these interface subnets based on your testbed requirements. Here we use IP addresses in same subnet for both the interfaces.
Note **
After you deploy the vCloud Director appliance, you cannot change the eth0 and eth1 network IP addresses or the hostname of the appliance. If you want the vCloud Director appliance to have different addresses or hostname, you must deploy a new appliance.
To see if the deployments succeeded, you can use the eth0 IP address of the primary cell to login to the Admin provider portal or you can check status of the cell by logging into the appliance management user interface at https://vcd_ip_address:5480.
In order to deploy standby cells, use same steps to deploy an appliance with deployment configuration as Standby small. Once deployed, embedded databases are configured in a replication mode with the primary database.
Note**
After the initial standby appliance deployment, the replication manager begins synchronizing its database with the primary appliance database. During this time, the vCloud Director database and therefore the vCloud Director UI are unavailable.
Once deployment is successful, you can verify the Database High Availability Cluster status by logging to either of cells admin portal or appliance management user interface.
What to do next:
If a standby cell is not in a running state, deploy a new standby cell.
If the primary cell is not in a running state, Recover from a Primary Database Failure in a High Availability Cluster.
Detailed step by step demo videos can be found on our Telco YouTube Channel
