I recently installed App HA in my lab and found some of the documentation unclear and at times hard to follow. I’m going to work with our Tech Pubs group to improve it. In the meantime I wanted to share what I learned to help make your installation easier.
First, pay attention to the pre-reqs!
Have DRS enabled on the cluster where you will be deploying the App HA appliance
Enable “VM and Application Monitoring” in your cluster HA settings
Create an IP Pool for the subnet(s) where you will install the Hyperic vApp
Have 3 static IP addresses ready for the App HA appliance, vFabric Hyperic Server & vFabric Hyperic Server DB
If you’ll want to use the email notification feature, make sure to configure email settings in vCenter
With those out of the way we are ready to get started. Here are the steps we are going to complete. I’ve broken this out into multiple posts to make navigating it easier.
In the vSphere Web Client, click Host and Clusters
Right-click the vCenter Server on which you want to deploy the vSphere App HA virtual appliance and select Deploy OVF template
Browse to the OVA file and select it, or type the URL from where you want to deploy the OVA template, and click Next
In the Review details screen, click Next
Accept the end user license agreement
Type a unique name of the virtual appliance, select the folder or datacenter where you want to deploy the OVF, and click Next. If more than one data center is present, you must select the datacenter on which you want to deploy the virtual appliance
Select the vApp configuration size/number of monitored VMs (small <50 VMs, medium 50-250 or large >250)
The Select storage screen appears where you can select the location to store the files of the deployed OVF template and the disk format.
Setup networks by selecting the Port Group, IP allocation (static is recommended), and the protocol settings if using static (DNS server(s), Gateway & Netmask).
Customize the template by entering and confirming passwords for the DB and Hyperic Admin accounts and adding IP addresses for the Hyperic Server and the vPostgres DB.
After deployment and powering on both machines verify that you can login to Hyperic http://<Hyperic Server IP address/DNS name>:7080 using the username “hqadmin” and password that you entered for “Hyperic Admin”
Connect to the console of the Hyperic server and set the timezone to the same timezone as your vCenter server. It is important that vCenter and the Hyperic server have the same time information. Restart the vFabric Hyperic server.
Deploy the vSphere App HA appliance – additional details on this are available in the vSphere App HA Installation Guide starting on page 12
In the vSphere Web Client, click Host and Clusters
Right-click the vCenter Server on which you want to deploy the vSphere App HA virtual appliance and select Deploy OVF template
Browse to the OVA file and select it, or type the URL from where you want to deploy the OVA template, and click Next
In the Review details screen, click Next
If a warning is displayed about the OVF package containing extra configuration options, make sure to select the Accept extra configuration options checkbox before you click Next
Accept the end user license agreement
Type a unique name of the virtual appliance (or accept the default), select the folder or datacenter where you want to deploy the OVF, and click Next. If more than one data center is present, you must select the datacenter on which you want to deploy the virtual appliance
The Select storage screen appears where you can select the location to store the files of the deployed OVF template
From the Select virtual disk format drop-down menu, select the disk format, and click Next
Configure the networks the deployed template should use
On the Customize template screen enter and confirm the SSH password for the vSphere App HA virtual machine, enter the required Network Properties and click Next
On the vService bindings screen, click Next
The Ready to Complete screen displays a summary of the deployment settings. Select Power on after deployment, and then click Finish. The process of deploying the vSphere App HA virtual appliance starts. This process might take several minutes.
Log out of the vSphere Web Client and log in again to view the vSphere App HA virtual appliance deployed on the vSphere Web Client. You can also see the vSphere App HA plug-in in the list of vCenter Server extensions in the vSphere Web Client
In Part 2 we will look at setting up App HA within vCenter and installing the Hyperic agent on vCenter.
