This is an overview of the manual deployment process that you need to follow to set up your on-premises VMware Cloud Director or vCenter SDDC with VMware Cloud Director service.

For detailed instructions on deploying an on-premises SDDC, follow the relevant links to the VMware Cloud Director documentation and to the NSX Administration Guide.

Prerequisites

Verify that you deployed and configured an on-premises SDDC that uses NSX for networking.

Procedure

  1. Create a jump host VM in the on-premises SDDC.
  2. Create a network segment for the reverse proxy appliance to use. See Add a Segment in NSX Administration Guide.
    • In the Segment Name text box, enter Proxy.
    • From the Connected Gateway drop-down menu, select Tier1 | Tier1.
    • From the Transport Zone drop-down menu, select TZ-Overlay.
    • In the Subnet text box, enter a valid subnet CIDR.
    • Click Edit DHCP Config and select the check box to activate DHCP configuration.
    • Enter one or more DHCP ranges.
    • In the DNS Servers text box, enter the IP addresses of your on-premises SDDC DNS servers.
  3. Create a VMware Cloud Director instance. See Create a VMware Cloud Director Instance.Deploying the Reverse Proxy Appliance
  4. Generate an API token to use when you associate your VMware Cloud Director instance to your on-premises SDDC. See How Do I Generate a VMware Cloud Director service API Token.
  5. On the jump host VM, log in to VMware Cloud Partner Navigator, navigate to VMware Cloud Director service and generate the proxy appliance. See How Do I Configure and Download the VMware Reverse Proxy OVА.
    To generate the reverse proxy OVA, enter the following information.
    • In the Data center name text box, enter the vCenter name of the SDDC to which you are going to associate the VMware Cloud Director instance.
    • In the vCenter FQDN text box, enter the FQDN for the vSphere Client.
    • In the Management IP text box, enter the IP address used to connect to and to manage the vCenter Server instance.
    • In the NSX URL text box, enter the URL for the NSX Manager instance.
    • Enter the list of the ESXi hosts that VMware Cloud Director must be able to access through the proxy connection.
      Note:

      You can use either a CIDR range, for example, 10.1.1.1/24, or a list of specific IP addresses. Use new lines to separate list entries.

      To ensure that future additions of ESXi hosts don't require updates to the allowed targets, use a CIDR notation to enter the ESXi hosts in the allow list.

      To retrieve the management IP addresses for an ESXi host, click the ESXi host name in vCenter Server, and then click Configure > VMkernel Adapters. Make a note of the IP addresses of the adapters with Management activated.

  6. Deploy the reverse proxy appliance. See Deploying the Reverse Proxy Appliance.
  7. Verify the proxy appliance connectivity.
    1. Log in to the proxy appliance as root.
    2. To verify the appliance has obtained an IP address, run ip a.
    3. To ensure that the service is active and running, run systemctl status transporter-client.service.
      Note: If the command results in an error, verify that DNS is working and it can access the internet.
    4. To verify the proxy appliance's connectivity, run transporter-status.sh.
    5. Run the command to diagnose any issues with the proxy appliance. 
      diagnose.sh -o OUTPUT_FILE
      See How Do I Troubleshoot the VMware Cloud Director service Proxy Client Appliance.
  8. In VMware Cloud Director service, navigate to the VMware Cloud Director instance from which you generated the proxy, and associate the data center through VMware Proxy Service. See How Do I Associate a VMware Cloud Director Instance with an SDDC via VMware Proxy.
    When the task completes, the SDDC shows up as a provider VDC in the VMware Cloud Director instance UI.
  9. Configure network connections.
    To provide network access to tenant workloads, allocate public IP addresses from the tier-0 for the tenant edge gateways and create DNAT rules.
    1. Allocate public IP addresses for tenant edge gateways.
    2. Create DNAT rules on the tier-0 gateway for public IP access to the tenant edge gateways. See Managing NSX Edge Gateways in the VMware Cloud Director Service Provider Admin Portal Guide.

Results

Your VMware Cloud Director service instance is ready to deploy tenant VMs.

For more information on how to use VMware Cloud Director service, see the VMware Cloud Director service documentation and the VMware Cloud Director documentation.