Planning the Hardware Requirements for the VMware Cloud Foundation Management Domain, Part 2: Cloud Operations and Automation

Previously, we built the hardware build of materials and determined the utilization of a basic VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) management domain deployment. But we need to put the "cloud" in by adding automation and self-service capabilities provided by vRealize Suite. To accomplish that, we can use SDDC Manager to deploy all the components of the vRealize Suite: Operations, Automation, and LogInsight into the SDDC. In this post, we'll explore the compute and storage requirements for these components like we did in the previous post.

Deploying vRealize Suite in VCF has a few requirements as seen below (from Administration > vRealize Suite menu) will give a list of requirements to get it up and running:

Preparing to Deploy vRealize Suite

While we are initiating a deployment of vRealize Suite from SDDC Manager, SDDC Manager doesn't deploy or maintain vRealize Suite itself; it calls upon vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRLCM) to deploy the components. Since this is likely the first software package you're installing in VCF, you'll need to download an install bundle. Once complete, you can download the vRealize Suite bundle and deploy vRealize Lifecycle Manager into VCF.

The second requirement is deploying Workspace ONE Access -- what's that? If you've been using VMware products for a while, you may recognize it's former name: VMware Identity Manager. VMware Workspace ONE Access provides identity and access management services to the SDDC by integrating with existing on-premises infrastructure components such as Active Directory, RADIUS, and RSA SecurID. VMware Workspace ONE Access needs to be installed on a Windows Server VM so check out the system requirements and install guide to complete that prerequisite.

vRealize Cloud Operations and Automation Components and Requirements

Installing vRealize Suite into VCF has more resource requirements since each product in the suite utilizes a cluster. Those resource requirements are found below. A VCF Management Domain with one VI workload domain and vRealize Suite is seen below:

Adding in vRealize Suite will have a substantial impact on resources and must be planned for accordingly. 

For a refresher, our initial BOM was:

vRealize Suite will consume the following resources in the management domain:

Now with the management domain components, one VI workload domain, and vRealize Suite, the management cluster will consume the following resources:

Just a slightly bigger box. In fact, we just need a little more capacity to get to approximately 75% utilization. By doubling the size of the disks (3.84 TB vs 1.92 TB) in the vSAN Sizer, we get a little too much capacity. In this scenario, I would likely add a few more disks to the disk group instead of making all 4 disks double in size. Unfortunately, the vSAN Sizer doesn't give me that granularity to illustrate but for this purpose, mission accomplished!

In the end, the goal of maintaining a four node management cluster is still achievable when adding vRealize Suite to a VCF Management Domain. HCI gives us the flexibility to scale up or scale out depending on the use case and need. In this scenario, we can scale up capacity to meet application demands without increasing licensing costs.

References

• VMware Validated Design 6
  • Deployment of Cloud Operations and Automation in the First Region
  • vRealize Suite Requirements
    • vRealize Lifecycle Manager (vRLCM)
    • vRealize Automation (vRA) Requirements
    • vRealize Operations (vROps) Requirements
    • vRealize LogInsight (vRLI) Requirements
• vRealize Suite Deployment Models (Quantity, Compute, and Storage Specs)
  • • Deployment Model of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager
    • Deployment Model of vRealize Operations Manager
    • Deployment Model of vRealize LogInsight
    • Deployment Model of vRealize Automation
• VMware Cloud Foundation
  • • Download an Install Bundle
    • Deploy vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager