Are management clusters and NFS required for vCloud 5.1 installs?

[MattG]

Just starting my vCloud journey and trying to make sense of requirements.

Can I install vCloud 5.1.1 on my existing vCenter environment without creating a seperate cluster/vCenter?  If so,  what are the possible concerns with this setup?   Does vCloud take all resources on the host that it manages or could I have Resource Pools outside of vCloud that woudl run non-cloud controlled VMs?

Is NFS required for 5.1.1?   If so,  is this an NFS share created on the vCloud Director server or an external NFS share?  If external,  what do admins do if no existing NFS infrastructure exists?

Thanks,

-MattG

[cfor]

Quick answer - is it possible: YES.  However it dos go against best practices.

(Make sure to review the vCloud Architecture Toolkit to at least understand the suggested starter layout)

http://www.vmware.com/cloud-computing/cloud-architecture/vcat-toolkit.html

That said, let me see what I can answer, if you need more detail on something please just ask.

"Are management clusters and NFS required for vCloud 5.1 installs"

No... however you would need to use resource pools and control some managment of them.  Clusters if possible is much cleaner as Vcloud director just controls everythin about the cluster, making it easy to know what needs to deal with what.

"Can I install vCloud 5.1.1 on my existing vCenter environment without creating a seperate cluster/vCenter?"

Yes, you can setup a new resource pool and point the provider VDC selection at that instead of at a cluster.

"If so,  what are the possible concerns with this setup?"

As you grow it could start to be a little more of a pain to sperate your "cloud managed" options and systems from your non-cloud.  The non-cloud could easly use resources that have not been managed carefully - causing cloud resources to have issues.

"Does vCloud take all resources on the host that it manages or could I have Resource Pools outside of vCloud that woudl run non-cloud controlled VMs?"

You can do this - again not the suggested setup.

"Is NFS required for 5.1.1?   If so,  is this an NFS share created on the vCloud Director server or an external NFS share?  If external,  what do admins do if no existing NFS infrastructure exists?"

NFS is not required.  You do want to have some shared storage for your vcloud cell nodes to access, NFS is normally the easy way to do this - however we have used shared VMDK's and other shared file mount options before.  If you used NFS you will need to make sure the NFS device has no_root_squash enabled - something sometimes can be an issue.

I hope this gets you going, if you have otehr conserns post away.