vCAC 6.0.1 Appliance Cluster Configuration

[DarrenGoff2]

Hi,

Has anyone successfully completed a distributed install with clustered vCAC Appliances? ANy guidance would be appreciated as the install guide is extremely light in this area. I have it installed in a PoC but it requires a manual DNS update to failover to the second appliance (which after copying the config files as per the install guide, appears to try to be the primary host, is this really how it is supposed to work!). It seems very clunky to me unless I'm doing something wrong.

[ross_davies]

Hi Darren,

I have completed this myself and have multiple active vCAC vApp's, multiple active IaaS web servers, active/standby IaaS App Servers and multiple agent instances which has been in production since the end of December. I'm in the process of writing up instructions and will post them onto my blog (www.rossdavies.info) soon.

[DarrenGoff2]

Hi Ross,

Thank you for your reply. If you have any draft versions you could share beforehand that would be great? I have a support call open with VMware and the only response I received yesterday was my SR was being passed to the vCHS team. Today they have just come back to me stating the vCHS Solution Acrhiects said the "operation is not possible". I am only trying to implement the vCAC 6 reference architecture, distributed architecture installation using a vCNS Edge LB from VMware documentation but it doesn't appear to work. 

[Aronov]

Hi Darren,

I have created distributed vCAC installation using Apache LB for the VCAC VAs and Microsoft NLB for the IaaS servers.

For the VCAC VA you need to pass 443 from the LB to the 8009 (ajp) on the VCAC VAs. You will need to copy the VA certificate (server.pem) to the LB as it will be the one creating the SSL tunnel. Also all the VCAC appliances need to be able to access the LB.

I think there is nothing specific for the IaaS LB. It needs to work for 443, all the IaaS servers need to have the same certificate and its CN needs to be the LB.

[DarrenGoff2]

Hi Aronov,

I am using vCNS Edge as my Load Balancer. I believe the VCAC VAs are now working. I needed to use the same common name for my certificate as the CAFE Host name configured in the VCAC Appliance and then copy the files as directed in the install guide.

I'm now having problems installing IaaS. I'm working with VMware Support but so far we are no nearer a working solution.

[Aronov]

Hi,

Do you get any error?

Are you using the same LB or a second one?

What I did was

1. have a certificate issued to the LB host name

2. Install IaaS on both servers behind the LB

3. specify this certificate during installation.

One thing that was tricky was that i haven't exposed the configuration site (running on 5480) and when I downloaded the IaaS installer from VA1 i had to rename the Setup so that its name matches the LB host name instead of VA1 (this is then used as the VA address during installation).