VMWare VCenter 6.7 VCHA with External Load Balanced PSC Installation Steps

vSphere 6.7 is released few days back with lots of cool new features.  This series will cover the installation of famous architecture of vCenter server 6.7 VCHA with external load balanced PSC implementation.

Some of the Major things to notice in vSphere 6.7

  1. The vSphere 6.7 release is the final release of vCenter Server for Windows.
  2. HTML5 client has many new features and it is close to fully functional flex client.
  3. In vSphere 6.7, only TLS 1.2 is enabled by default. TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are disabled by default. so we might encounter communication issues related to TLS after upgrading from old releases to vCenter 6.7
  4. You cannot install VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 on the original release of ESXi 6.0 with an IPv6 network. Instead, install vCenter Server Appliance on ESXi 6.0 Update 1a or later with an IPv6 network.
  5. Upgrade and patch operations of virtual appliances is deprecated in Update Manager 6.7 release.

To make it easy this series is split in to 5 parts.

Part 1 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : External PSC for LB Step-By-Step Installation

Part 2 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : PSC External Certificate Installation

Part 3 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : PSC loadBalancing with NetScaler

Part 4 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : VCenter 6.7 Installation with External PSC

Part 5 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : VCenter 6.7 VCHA configuration

vCenter 6.7 VCHA Architecture

In this series will cover the installation of vCenter 6.7 with load balanced External PSC controllers. As the Architecture is clearly shown we will have 2 PSC nodes. It will be load balanced by either F5/Netscaler/NSX load balancer. In this series we will use Netscaler as Load balancer. After that We will build the vCenter server Pointing to the Load balanced PSC VIP. Once the vCenter is up and running will enable VCHA.

pre-requisites for this series

As it is clearly shown in the architecture vCenter 6.7 VCHA with external PSC require some pre-requisites. We will cover the necessary pre-requisites for each post as well for simplicity.

  1. Necessary Hypervisor resources (ESXi 6.0 U1a or Later) for 2 PSC, 3 vCenter VM’s.
  2. Separate network subnet and port group for VCHA ( shown in blue)
  3. IP’s and DNS records (forward and reserve) pre-created for PSC and vCenter.
  4. DNS and NTP Server
  5. Certificate authority credentials to create external CA certificate for PSC ( PSC generated certificate also can be used).
  6. Tools like putty, WINSCP, chrome and firefox browsers.

 

vCenter 6.7 Series

Part 1 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : External PSC Step-By-Step Installation

This post will cover the installation and configuration of 2 vCenter 6.7 PSC appliances, with one Single Sign On Domain and One site.

Part 1 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : External PSC for LB Step-By-Step Installation

Part 2 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : PSC External Certificate Installation

For the load balancing to work the certificate on PSC nodes needs to be replaced. Below post will help with detailed steps to replace the SSL Certificate on the PSC nodes with certificate  having subject alternative names for both PSC nodes and Load balanced vip name.

Part 2 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : PSC External Certificate Installation

Part 3 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : PSC loadBalancing with NetScaler

In this post will cover the load balancing of PSC servers with Netscaler. If you are new to Netscaler or wanted to refresh on some basic concepts of Netscaler please view my Netscaler series here. The click here for installation steps to install Netscaler VPX virtual instance on ESXi.

Part 3 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : PSC loadBalancing with NetScaler

Part 4 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : vCenter 6.7 Installation with External PSC

This post will cover the installation of vCenter server and pointing it to the external load balanced PSC which we had implemented in the last three posts of this series.

Part 4 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : VCenter 6.7 Installation with External PSC

Part 5 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : vCenter 6.7 VCHA configuration

This post will cover the vCenter High Availability part (VCHA). VCHA is pretty easy to enable as its available under the configuration section of vCenter server.

Part 5 : VMWare VCenter 6.7 : VCenter 6.7 VCHA configuration

Hope this series is useful, leave your comments and feedback.

Siva Sankar

Siva Sankar works as Solution Architect in Abu Dhabi with primary focus on SDDC, Automation,Network Virtualization, Digital Workspace, VDI, HCI and Virtualization products from VMWare, Citrix and Microsoft.

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