Migrating to load-balanced multi-cell setup

[iceman76]

Hello,

we are currently moving our single cell vCloud DIrector to a multi-cell setup with a load balance in frotn of it. The plan is to add additional cells which are located behind the load balancer, an then removing the old cell. We keep the FQDN of portal and console-proxy, just change DNS, so that the old cell is not used any longer by clients

We added the load blancer and the second cell. Accessing the wep-portal and console-proxy over the load-balancer works without problems during our tests. But there is one thing i do not understand

In the Cloud-Cells list of vCloud-Director all of our cells are displayed, but only the old/first cell has a green check mark in the vCenter column (see attachement) Is that normal behaviour ? What will happen if we remove the old cell, will another cell get that check mark ?

Thank you

[abhilashhb]

I think only the co-ordinator cell in the multi-cell environment will own the vCenter. All the other cells will just co-ordinate the deployment.

Since you deployed the first cell and it was the only one it became the co-ordinator after the second cell was introduced.

This is a good read

VMware KB: VMware vCloud Director multi-cell features

[iceman76]

That seems to make sense. I'll give it a try

[IamTHEvilONE]

The green check mark is for the vCenter Proxy Service.  In this case you have two cells and at least one vCenter.  If you shut down the first cell, the vCenter proxy will migrate to cell number 2.

The vCenter Proxy is what sends commands to a specific vCenter.

e.g. when load balanced your HTTP session might go to cell #2.  you request to copy a vApp from Catalog to My Cloud.  Cell 2 queues the request in the database.  Cell 1 sees a new task to be done, and performs the copy commands.  Cell 2 will refresh the website information, and you see tasks being performed.

If you want to continue to have failover, you should have N+1 cells.  Where N is the number of vCenters attached to the vCloud Director installation.