Deploy vRA on Fusion (direct) or on a ESXi VM (on fusion)

[Paul_SI]

Hi all,

Me and 6 colleagues are building a vRealize homelab on a mac using fusion So we all went searching on Google to find some best practices and some of us are returning with totally different angles regarding the deployment of all the VM's.

- The one like to deploy all the VM's on Fusion directly and wants to use the network features of fusion. So that Fusion hosts (ESXi, vCenter, LCM, vRA, vRO), then he wanted to use the ESXi server only as a deployment target for testing VM's.

- The other wanted to deploy two ESXi VM's (redundant for DRS testing) and wanted to deploy all products accross those two hosts. ESXi-1 (vCenter/vRA/vRO) Esxi-2 (LCM, deployment_target). The network is being managed inside vCenter and spread over 2 switches (internal/external).

What do you think about these both scenarios??

[Mikero · Accepted solution]

They're both doable with sufficient CPU, RAM and a speedy disk.

I've done both on my iMac Pro and it holds up, with a caveat...

The more you nest, the more performance you're going to loose to virt overhead.

So if the intention is to test a deployment script on a virtual ESXi to deploy a nested SDDC, which will later be used with a physical ESXi box (rather than just a big VM or two), for example, that would be okay but it'll be slow. You're doing Fusion > ESXi > ESXi > workload, so 3 levels of nesting...

If you actually want to use the SDDC that you deploy for testing, lab-purposes, you'd want to do that with the top-level virtualization, meaning a bunch of VMs in Fusion (your scenario 1).

So... scenario 1 = great for tesing the end products, vm's running in esxi-vms will be slower than usual, but totally usable for demo purposes (the less GUI the better tho).

Scenario 2 = sufficient for testing a deployment script that will go onto physical devices.

It depends on your goals to determine the right approach tho.

[Paul_SI]

Hi Michael,

Thank you for sharing your findings, I've done as you suggested and installed everything in Fusion. Except all vRealize products, the easy_installer asks for a datacenter/cluster and I think it is impossible to point this to fusion. So on the ESXi host I have vRA LCM and IDM for now

Regards, Paul