Onboarding an Agent with Data Management for VMware Tanzu

Onboarding an Agent with Data Management for VMware Tanzu registers the vSphere Cluster in which the Agent VM is deployed, creating an association that makes it an available target for Service Instance VMs provisioned by users in the owning organizations.

Audience

The procedures in this topic are performed by a Data Management for VMware Tanzu user in the Organization Administrator role.

Prerequisites

Before you onboard an Agent, ensure that you have installed and configured all the Hardware and Software Requirements and you can identify:

Your Organization Administrator login credentials for the Data Management for VMware Tanzu console, and you have reset your login password (Local user only).
The fully-qualified distinguished name or IP Address of the Provider VM.
The fully-qualified distinguished name or IP Address of your vCenter Server instance.
The login credentials of a vCenter user that has the vSphere privileges required to create users and roles.
The vSphere data center and cluster in which the Agent VM was deployed.
The IP Address of the Agent VM.
The VM Folder in which to locate the Service Instance VMs.
The S3-compatible object store URL, bucket, and keys for the Agent Local Storage and Cloud Storage; you must pre-create the buckets.

You must perform these tasks on a host that can access the Agent VM.

Procedure

Open a browser window and enter the IP Address of the Agent VM.
Sign in to the Agent Onboarding console using the Agent VM root credentials that you set when you deployed the VM.

The DMS Agent Console Onboarding screen displays.
Follow the 7 Steps to complete DMS Agent Console Onboarding Settings Configuration and Validation.

Step1 Authentication - Provide the following information in the Authentication pane:

Field Name	Description
Provider FQDN/IP	The IP address or fully-qualified distinguished name of the Provider VM to which to onboard the Agent.
DMS Username	A Data Management for VMware Tanzu Local or LDAP user name that has been assigned the Organization Administrator role.
DMS Password	The password for the DMS Username.

Click VALIDATE.
Note: If you get any message of authentication failure, verify that:
- You have downloaded and installed the .ova files for the Provider and Agent from the same release.
- You have used the Agent VM root credentials to sign in to the Agent Onboarding console. You set this password when you deployed the VM.
- You have Validated Provider Readiness for Onboarding.
Examine the Provider thumbprint displayed in the Trust Provider Certificate dialog, and click CONTINUE if you trust the host.

The Onboarding Type pane of the DMS Agent Console Onboarding Settings screen displays.
You have the option to create a new Agent environment, or restore an existing Agent environment. In this case:
1. Select your Organization name from the drop-down list.
2. Click Create New Environment, and then click CONTINUE.

Step2 - Specify the vCenter Configuration:

Property Name	Value
vCenter FQDN/IP	The IP address or fully-qualified distinguished name of your vCenter Server instance.
Username	The vCenter administrator user name.
Password	The password for Username.

Click CONNECT.
Examine the VCENTER thumbprint displayed in the Trust VCENTER Certificate dialog, and click CONTINUE if you trust the host.

The Local & Cloud Storage settings form displays.

Step3a - Specify the Local Storage Configuration:

Note: You must specify different local and cloud storage buckets.

Property Name	Value
Local Storage Type	Select the type of storage from the drop-down list. You can choose S3_COMPATIBLE_STORAGE or AWS.
Endpoint Url/Fqdn	The URL to the object store.
AWS Region	If you selected the AWS storage type, use the drop-down list to select the region.
Access Key	The access key for the object store.
Secret Key	The secret key for the object store.
Bucket	The name of the bucket.

VALIDATE the settings.

Step3b - Specify the Cloud Storage Configuration:

Note: You must specify different local and cloud storage buckets.

Property Name	Value
Cloud Storage Type	Select the type of storage from the drop-down list. You can choose S3_COMPATIBLE_STORAGE or AWS.
Endpoint Url/Fqdn	The URL to the object store.
AWS Region	If you selected the AWS storage type, use the drop-down list to select the region.
Access Key	The access key for the object store.
Secret Key	The secret key to the object store.
Bucket	The name of the bucket.

VALIDATE the settings.

The Placement settings form displays.

Step5 - Specify the Placement Configuration:

Property Name	Value
Datacenter	Select the vCenter data center from the dropdown list.
Cluster	Select the cluster to deploy compute resources for Service Instance VM provisioning.
VM Folder	Select the folder in which to place the Service Instance VMs.

The DataStore and Network settings form displays.

Step6 - Specify the Datastore and Network Configuration:

Property Name	Value
DB datastore	Click the plus icon to select the desired datastore storage type.
Application Network	Select the network for the Service Instance VMs from the dropdown list. Users and applications will access the service via this network.
Control Plane Network	Select the control plane network for the Service Instance VMs from the dropdown list. The Control Plane Network that you configured for the Agent VM must be able to access this network.
DB FQDN Suffix	The fully-qualified distinguished name suffix for the Service Instance VM instances.

Click UPDATE.

Settings configuration is complete and the onboarding process begins.
Step7 - Summary:

Review the Agent Environment Summary.
Onboarding is complete when Step6 and the Current Agent Settings pane both display a green checkmark icon.

Note: If you run into any issues with the onboarding, you must delete the Agent VM, delete the infrastructure, and re-start the Agent VM deployment and onboarding process from scratch.
Take note of the ENV ID assigned to the Agent VM; you will need this information should you be required to recover the Agent.
Step8 - Validate Successful Onboarding of the Agent:

Review Infrastructure of the onboarded agent.
From the left navigation pane, select Infrastructure.

The Infrastructure view table displays the currently onboarded infrastructure.
Click the row that lists the currently onboarded infrastructure.

Information about the agent is displayed in detail.
Click the Health tab and verify that all the rows of the Tenant Health Status table has Status as OK.

Next Steps

You successfully registered the Agent with Data Management for VMware Tanzu and now have an Onboarded Cluster. Next, you may choose to:

Configure a DNS forward rule from your DNS server to the DMS DNS server for the Onboarded Cluster.
Contact the Provider Administrator and request that they add users to the Organization.
Log in to Data Management for VMware Tanzu, and access the user console to provision a service such as a database.

Addressing Onboarding Issues

If you run into an issue during Agent onboarding, you must delete the infrastructure and re-start the deployment and onboarding process.

Deleting Misconfigured Infrastructure

Warning: Data Management for VMware Tanzu supports deleting infrastructure only to repair an issue that you encounter during Agent onboarding.

Perform the following procedure to delete a misconfigured infrastructure:

Delete the Agent VM from vCenter.
Log in to the Data Management for VMware Tanzu console.
Select Infrastructure from the left navigation pane.
Examine the infrastructures listed in the table, identify the infrastructure that you want to delete, and navigate to that table row.
Click the infrastructure Agent VM IP.

The infrastructure information Details tab displays.
Click the INFRA ACTIONS button located in the upper right-hand corner of the view, and select Delete from the pop-up menu.

The Confirmation dialog displays.
If you are certain that you want to delete the infrastructure, click CONFIRM.

Custom Onboarding Configuration

Data Management for VMware Tanzu exposes certain onboarding properties. You can customize these properties before you begin onboarding, or if you face issues during the onboarding process.

Onboarding-related properties are located in the /opt/vmware/tdm-tenant/onboarding-service/config/application.yml file on the Agent VM.

Latency

If you face latency issues during onboarding, you can specify a custom values for these configuration properties:

Property Name	Default Value	Description
rabbitmq.start.timeout.seconds	120	The default timeout for the RabbitMQ Service. Onboarding fails if the RabbitMQ Service does not start up within this time period.
rabbitmq.shovel.creation.timeout.seconds	300	The default timeout for creating the RabbitMQ shovel. Onboarding fails if all RabbitMQ shovels are not running within this time period.
solution.user.session.timeout.seconds	3600	The default timeout for the Solution User session.

Password Policies

Data Management for VMware Tanzu includes some pre-defined password policies. If these policies conflict with those defined in the organization, you can use the following properties to customize:

Property Name	Default Value	Description
password.policy.allowed-special-chars	!@#$%^&*	The special characters allowed in the `tdm-read-only` monitoring user password. This might be required if the organization has specific password policy requirements, and you want to ??add or?? remove certain special character from the SSO user's password.
password.policy.reset-before-days	3	The number of days before expiration that the `tdm-read-only` monitoring SSO user password will be reset.
password.expiry-poll-cron	0 0 0 * * * (Everyday midnight, 12 AM)	Scheduled CRON Job for validating `tdm-read-only` monitoring user password expiration.

Procedure

Perform the following procedure to customize one or more Data Management for VMware Tanzu onboarding properties:

Identify the names of the properties that you wish to customize, and the new property values.
SSH into the Agent VM using vCenter.
Open the /opt/vmware/tdm-tenant/onboarding-service/config/application.yml in the editor of your choice, add or reset the properties, and then exit the editor.

Restart the onboarding service:

root@agent_vm$ systemctl restart onboarding.service

Log out of the Agent VM.
(Re)initiate the Agent VM onboarding procedure.