Introduction to Expand an Existing Installation

You can deploy and configure additional nodes so that VMware Aria Operations can support larger environments. A primary node always requires an additional node for a cluster to monitor your environment. With expanding your installation, you can add more than one node to your cluster.

Adding Data Nodes

Data nodes are the additional cluster nodes that allow you to scale out VMware Aria Operations to monitor larger environments.

You can dynamically scale out VMware Aria Operations by adding data nodes without stopping the VMware Aria Operations cluster. When you scale out the cluster by 25% or more, you should restart the cluster to allow VMware Aria Operations to update its storage size, and you might notice a decrease in performance until you restart. A maintenance interval provides a good opportunity to restart the VMware Aria Operations cluster.

In addition, the product administration options include an option to re-balance the cluster, which can be done without restarting. Rebalancing adjusts the VMware Aria Operations workload across the cluster nodes.

Figure 1. Expand an existing installation from the Setup screen

Note: Do not shut down online cluster nodes externally or by using any means other than the VMware Aria Operations interface. Shut down a node externally only after taking it offline in the VMware Aria Operations interface.