Vmware 2V0-41.20 – NSX-T Installation Part 2

2. Demo: Installing NSX Manager

Am in the Vsphere client and I’m just going to go to Hosts and Clusters and I’ve kind of scaled back what I have in my home lab. Right now, I only have one ESXi host. So I’ll just right click on my ESXi host and I’ll choose Deploy OVF template. And I’m going to find the local file that I have downloaded. I’ve downloaded the OVA file for NSA manager. And here it is. It’s called NSX unified appliance. So I’ll go ahead and open that and I’ll click on Next and I’m going to give the virtual machine a name. I’m just going to call it Nsxmgr Three. I’m going to put it in my Rick Krishi data center.

I’m going to pick an ESXi host for it to run on. And I’ll click next here. It’s showing me a bunch of the configured parameters for this virtual appliance. I’m just going to hit Next here, and then I’m going to choose my deployment configuration. I’m going to go with a Small. So for Small, this is good for a lab or a proof of concept type environment. I’m going to need four virtual CPUs, 16 gigs of memory, and 300 gigs of storage. And I have to have virtual hardware version ten or later. Like I mentioned, this is a vsphere. Seven environment. So I’ve got the latest version of virtual hardware available. And with the production environment, I could go with Medium.

That would be anything up to 64 hosts. For more than 64 hosts, you’d be going with large. So I’m going to choose small as my size here. I’m going to configure a thin provisioned virtual disk and I’ll pick a data store upon which I want to store the files for this NSX Manager Virtual appliance. Now, what I will say before I go any further is that this data store that I’m showing here does not have enough space for this NSX Manager Virtual appliance. So the installation is going to fail eventually. What I want to recommend is if you’re following along at home, make sure you have a data store with enough capacity to actually run this NSX Manager Virtual appliance. So I’m going to choose. This is Cosy data store two. I’ll click next. Which network do I want the first network interface of this virtual appliance to be connected to? I’ve got a network called VM Network. I’m going to choose that. My IP protocol is going to be IP version four. And then I need to set up some passwords here.

So first off, we’ve got the system root user password and it has to be at least twelve characters. It has to have upper case and lowercase characters. It has to have at least one special character and at least five of the characters need to be unique. So there’s my root user password. I’m going to just set the same password for my CLI admin. And I’m also going to set the same password for CLI audit. You may want to use different passwords for each of these accounts in a production environment, but in my little lab here, using the same password for each of them is no problem because I’m the only person who uses it anyways. And then I’ll set a username for the CLI admin by default. It’s just going to be admin, so I’ll just leave that as is. The CLI audit username is going to be audit by default, so I’ll just leave that as is as well.

And I’m going to move down here to network properties. And the host name of this VM is going to be Nsxmgr Three lab local. So I’m putting in my FQDN here the role name. I have different options. I can install different types of virtual appliances with this media. So do I. Want NSX manager, NSX Cloud Service manager or NSX global manager? I’m going to choose NSX manager. And I do not need a site name because I’m not deploying Global Manager. The default gateway is 192168. Dot one, nine, nine, dot two. The management IP address is going to be 1921-681-9918, and the net mask is going to be 255-255-2550. I’ll also put in the address of my DNS server here and my domain search list.

And also I’ll put in the address of my NTP server, which in my case just happens to be the same server as my DNS server. And I’m going to enable SSH on my NSX manager instance. I’m also going to allow root SSH logins. Now, you’ll notice right here, it’s telling you that is not recommended for security reasons. But again, this is just a lab environment. So I’m going to roll with it and make it a little bit easier on myself to continue to manage this. And now I’m just going to set the password for Manager token here because it won’t let me move on until I set that. But I’m going to leave all of the rest of these internal properties at their defaults. And I’ll go ahead and hit next, and I’ll hit finish.

And at this point, it should start rolling out the virtual appliance that NSX Manager is going to run on. And you can see here, it almost immediately gives me an insufficient disk space. So I wanted to show you this error because even though I chose a thin provisioned VMDK, it still won’t work. I have to have the available disk space. So I’m just going to pause my recording and retrying a data store that actually has 300 gigs or more of free space.

Okay, so here you can see I’ve restarted the OVF deployment on a larger data store. This one had 400 gigs of free space, so it should be plenty. And it’s now 50% complete. So I’m just going to pause my recording while the deployment process of the NSX Manager virtual appliance completes. Okay, so now we can see that my NSX Manager virtual appliance installation is complete. I’m just going to go ahead and power it on now in order to power this virtual machine on, let’s take a quick look at the settings for the VM and for this NSX MGR Three virtual machine. You’ll notice that it has a memory reservation of 16 gigs. So you’ll also notice it has a CPU reservation of 4000 MHz.

So those are resource reservations that must be provided by the ESXi host in order for this virtual machine to boot. And you can see here I can’t power it on because my ESXi host does not have sufficient resources to satisfy those reservations. The host itself does not have enough available memory. So I’m just going to take a moment and change the resources available on this ESXi host. Okay, so now here we can see that my ESXi host has been upgraded with more memory. So let’s try to power on our NSX Manager virtual appliance one more time and we’ll monitor under recent tasks here. And there we go. It actually powered on this time, so that’s great.

Now we’ve got the virtual machine powered on and we could launch the console here. And if we watch the console, we can watch this virtual appliance completely boot up. So once this virtual appliance has completely finished booting, what I’m going to do is I’m going to run a few tests and it looks like it’s there. I’m going to log in with the root password that I established during the installation. And there we go. It looks like we’re all set. This is booted up and ready to go. So I’m going to exit out of the command prompt here. So now you can see that my NSX Manager virtual appliance is booted up and ready to go. I got the IP address of it right here. So I’m going to try a couple of quick tests here to make sure that it’s working properly.

First off, I’m going to try to ping the IP address and make sure that responds. And it looks like that’s working. Now I’m going to go back to the console of NSX Manager. I’m going to run a couple of ping tests from there, going to try to ping the DNS server and that’s working properly. I’m going to make sure that it can ping the management interface of ESXi hosts in the same network and it looks like it can. And I’m also going to validate that my SSH access is working as well. So I’m going to launch Putty. I’ll put the IP address of the NSX Manager instance in here. I’m going to log in as root. I’ll put in my credentials and there we go. I am in. Okay, so there’s one last piece of the puzzle here that I just want to validate. I’m going to try to ping Nsxmgr Three lab local and make sure that DNS resolution is also working. And you can see that’s not found. So I may want to take a moment here to just go into my DNS server.

So in my environment, I’m using Windows Server for DNS. I’m going to just quickly open up DNS Manager here. And in my forward lookup zone, I’m going to create a new record for Nsxmgr three lab local, and I’m going to put in my IP address. And that should automatically create the necessary record in my reverse lookup zone. I’ll just verify that as well. There it is. Okay, so now the final test that I want to run here is I want to try and ping this by name again. Now, as just a quick side note here. The first time I tried to ping by the fully qualified domain name, it didn’t work.

I had to flush DNS on my computer. So if you’re having a problem pinging based on that DNS entry, you may want to try that. And there we go. Now that we’ve got it added to DNS, I can ping it by the fully qualified domain name. Okay, so the final step that I want to take here is I want to try to connect to NSX Manager from my web browser. However, I just want to warn you, it’s going to take a while before this NSX Manager virtual appliance is ready to receive incoming web connections.

So if you try this and it doesn’t work, you may just want to step away for a while and give it time because the first couple of times that I tried this, it didn’t work. And I thought something might be wrong, but that wasn’t the case. It just takes a while for the actual web piece of this to come up. So now we’re in. We’re ready to log in. I’m going to put in my admin username here, and I’m just going to click on Login and I put in the password that I set up during the appliance installation process here. And that should bring me to my little end user license agreement here.

Yes, I’m going to go ahead and accept that and I’m going to join the Customer Experience Improvement Program. I always just recommend doing that when you’re working in your lab. And now it’s going to give me some next steps here. Real nice, simple way to kind of walk you through what the next few things you need to do are. So I’m just going to choose don’t show this again. You can see here we actually need to manage our licenses.

It looks like I’m missing the license key. So I’m just going to go ahead and go there. I’m going to click on Add and I’m going to grab my license key. So this is my license key. And just a reminder, I got my licenses from the V Mug Eval experience. You can see all of those details in my home lab course, where I create a Vs versus seven home lab. So I’m just going to go ahead and add this license key. And there we go. Now, you can see my license key has been successfully assigned. So I’ve dealt with my little license issue here, and I’m ready to go ahead and get started. Configuring Nsxt.

3. Demo: Add a Compute Manager

Doing is simply following along with the Nsxt 3. 0 documentation. So the last few steps in the Nsxt documentation we’re setting up NSX Manager. The next step is to add Compute Manager. So I’ll include a link to this document in the Udemy course resources, but I just want to make sure that everybody is aware that if you want or you can also follow along in the documentation in here as well. Okay, so here I am at the home screen of my NSX Manager interface and I am logged in as Admin.

And before we get started here, I just want to mention a major difference here between Nsxt versus NSX for Vsphere. The big difference here is that there’s no dependency on the Compute Manager. So with NSX for Vsphere we had to have Vcenter. We managed everything through the Vsphere web client and that’s not the case here with Nsxt. This is designed to support multiple different types of hypervisors including ESXi or KVM. So in this case the management plane is independent of Vcenter.

I’ve got this GUI here just for Nsxt. So I could potentially have virtual machine workloads running on different types of hypervisors. That’s why this management interface is decoupled from Vcenter. So here at the main screen of the Nsxt user interface, I’m going to go to System and under System I’ll click on Fabric. Under Fabric we find Compute Managers. And so now I’m just going to simply add a Compute Manager. I’m going to call it VCSA demo. This is going to be my Vcenter server, Vcsademo Lab local. I’ll put in the credentials for my Vcenter server itself.

And I also need my Vcenter Sha 256 thumbprint. So I’ll just click on the Add button and it should automatically populate the thumbprint for me as you can see here. So I don’t need to go into Putty or SSH or anything like that to retrieve the thumbprint. It will automatically bring it up for me. So now I’ll just click on Add. And so now this might take a little time here to actually show the Compute Manager. I’m just going to switch my view from transport zones and switch it back to Compute Managers. Yeah, so I may need to give it a few minutes before it shows as up. At the moment you can see here it’s in the registered state and we can look at the connection here and it’s still in the process of connecting.

So it may take some time to register this Compute Manager with Vcenter and for the connection status to appear as up. You can click on the Compute Manager name here to view the details of this Compute Manager. You can also edit the Compute Manager here as well. So if I click on Edit, I could change the name of it, I could change the IP address or the FQDN, or I could enable or disable Trust. So I’ll just cancel that. So at this point I’ve added a compute manager.

I could potentially delete this compute manager right now if I wanted to. But we’re going to keep moving on in future lessons, doing things like adding transport nodes and adding service virtual machines. Once I start doing stuff like that, like adding transport nodes, I won’t be able to delete this compute manager while those other components are still out there. So now we’ve successfully added a compute manager. In our next lesson, we’ll start working on adding additional nodes to NSX manager and creating a cluster.