How to achieve Single URL for Multi Site Setup - Tenant Login

[imfaisal87]

https://cloudportalurlA/provider is single portal address, in case of multi-site will have another portal address i.e. https://cloudportalB/provider - this make sense from Admin point of you.

If my sites are Active / Active and offered to customers, do I need to give them separate URL to access their Organization within different sites? - Isn't there a central way, considering I might grow few more sites in span of time and giving them multiple URLs to access is not a viable option?

[paluszekd]

Hi there,

This can be achieved by the new federation association system that was introduced in vCD 9.x. In my lab environment, I've federated my Site-A and B. The tenant can log in to either site and view all orgVDCs associated between these two sites.

Whitepaper here: https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/vcat/architecting-multi-site-vmwar...

[imfaisal87]

I am aware of the federation but this is after onboarding a Tenant on both Sites, whereas what I am looking for is customer to just type a single URL for example:

https://centralsite or https://centralsite/tenant/testorg

This redirects to site1 or site2 based on validating where the customer resides, or ask a customer which site he wants to access rather then giving customer multiple URLS if he is multi site customer. This will also help in me if I introduce site3 or having maintenance of site 1 etc.

Something similar to how Public Cloud works, you login and then navigate to site you are interested in.

[paluszekd · Accepted solution]

Not possible today with vCD. To achieve this, you would need to utilize a northbound solution like a GLSB or utilize WorkspaceONE that federates each vCD instance and passes the SAML handoff to that respective site.

[imfaisal87]

We do have GSLB, would like to understand more on how it should be implemented considering each tenant have their own URL and how it will filter between URL etc., also what will happen if one site portal is down for maintenance.

If you have any experience over this, would appreciate your share on it.

[pceglowski]

It may not be quite what you are after, but the way we are doing this is by utilising AWS R53 GSLB and a set of reverse proxies (haproxy/nginx/f5/you pick) in each site with two front-end services (virtual servers) with one redirecting to another. You are ending up with the following:

AWS R53 DNS A record with routing policy of multivalue answer and associated health-checks to my.vcd.com pointing to IPs of both sites -> each site with nginx virtual server listening and accepting my.vcd.com server names and redirecting it to another local virtual server of my.siteN.vcd.com.

Rough excerpt from nginx:

server {

  listen 443;

  server_name my.vcd.com;

  return 302 https://my.siteN.vcd.com$request_uri;

}

server {

  listen 443;

  server_name my.siteN.vcd.com;

  ...

}

As Daniel stated, vCD is currently unable to accept requests on more than one hostname / URL, hence redirect is the only way we were able to make it work.

[imfaisal87]

Yes, was also thinking few of similar ways to achieve it.

Was considering if there was out-of-the-box way but turns out their isn't yet.

Thanks for your share. Appreciated.