To prepare your on-premises environment for deployment, you must manually configure your vSphere environment settings.

You must finish the following configuration steps to prepare your vSphere environments for an on-premises VMware Blockchain deployment.

Prerequisites

Verify that your environment has vSphere 7.0 installed. See vSphere Installation and Setup Process.

Procedure

  1. Log in to vCenter Server.
  2. Configure a cluster of hosts.

    See vSphere Cluster Services.

  3. Create a datastore for allocating datastore resources to VMware Blockchain.

    The minimum requirement for allocating datastore resources is a single host. See Create a Datastore Cluster.

  4. To dedicate cluster resources for VMware Blockchain, create a resource pool.

    See Create a Resource Pool.

  5. Set up a content library to store VMware Blockchain templates in the vSphere inventory.
    1. Add the subscription URL as the content library distribution point. See Create a Library.
    2. Configure a vSphere content library to pull from the VMware Blockchain Orchestrator IP address to deploy VMware Blockchain VMS.

      The content library server is available within the VMware Blockchain Orchestrator appliance.

      http://<orchestrator-ip-address>:8083/lib.json

      USB HSM - http://<orchestrator-ip-address>:8083/usb/lib.json

  6. To group the same objects for easier management, create a VM and Templates folder.
    Note:

    You must assign a unique folder name and use this folder name across multiple vCenter Server clusters.

    See Create a Folder.

  7. (Optional) Create a vSphere Standard Switch or a vSphere Distribute Switch with a VM port group for the network connectivity with VMware Blockchain.
    Note:

    The VM network name you assign here is used for VMware Blockchain.

    See Create a vSphere Standard Switch or Create a vSphere Distributed Switch.

  8. (Optional) Configure the DNS settings to denote the network gateway, subnet size, and IP address range in the subnet allocated exclusively for VMware Blockchain.

    See Edit the DNS and IP Address Settings.

    Note:

    The vSphere and VMware Cloud have different terminology that refers to the same feature option. For example, in vSphere, the port group name option equates to the compute network option in VMware Cloud.

  9. Create a VMware Blockchain service role with required privileges and assign roles to the newly created vCenter Server objects.

    Menu Item

    Configuration

    Content Library

    Select the Read storage menu item.

    Datastore section

    Select the Allocate Space menu item.

    Network

    Select all the menu items.

    Resource

    Assign a vApp to the resource pool.

    vApp

    Select all the menu items.

    Virtual Machine

    Select all the menu items.
  10. Create a service user account in the vCenter Server.

    See Using Active Directory to Manage ESXi Users.

What to do next

You can optionally verify permissions and VM connectivity. See Verify vSphere Permissions and VM Connectivity.