The deployment specification details the design decisions covering physical design. VMware Aria Operations is a SaaS offering managed by VMware - the only components deployed within the VMware Cloud Foundation instance are the VMware Cloud Proxy appliances.

Cloud Proxy Appliance

The Cloud Proxy connects VMware Cloud Services Platform (CSP) services to on-premises data centers. The Cloud Proxy is an appliance delivered as an OVA file that you deploy within your on-premises vCenter Server.

The Cloud Proxy includes specific agents for the various VMware Cloud services and supports data communication between VMware Aria Operations and the managed vCenter Server environment. The Cloud Proxy provides life cycle management of itself, as well as data delivery and communications functionality. Within the Cloud Proxy, service agents gather data and use a data pipeline service that provides high throughput and low latency data delivery. It also controls channel communication between the Cloud Proxy instances that are deployed to an on-premises vCenter Server and the VMware Cloud services. For more information, see VMware Cloud Services Cloud Proxy.
Table 1. Design Decisions on the Deployment of the Cloud Proxy Appliances

Decision ID

Design Decision

Design Justification

Design Implication

CBO-CDP-CFG-001

Deploy two Cloud Proxy appliances per region.

Provides resilient data collector functionality for VMware Aria Operations.

None.

CBO-CDP-CFG-002

Deploy the Cloud Proxy appliances in the default management vSphere cluster.

Required to establish secure communication between the VMware Cloud Foundation instance and VMware Aria Operations.

The Cloud Proxy appliances must be able to connect to VMware Aria Operations through a firewall.

CBO-CDP-CFG-003

Protect the Cloud Proxy appliances by using vSphere High Availability.

Supports the availability objective without requiring manual intervention during an ESXi host failure.

None.

CBO-CDP-CFG-004

Deploy the Cloud Proxy appliances with the Standard size.

Provides support for the required number of monitored objects.

None.

CBO-CDP-CFG-005

Place the Cloud Proxy appliances in a designated virtual machine folder.

Provides organization of the appliances in the management domain vSphere inventory.

You must create the virtual machine folder before deployment.

CBO-CDP-CFG-006

Enable data persistence on all Cloud Proxy appliances.

Provides the ability to store data in case of connectivity issues.

Storage availability on each Cloud Proxy appliance must be monitored.

CBO-CDP-CFG-007

Create a collector group for each region and assign respective Cloud Proxy appliances per region.

The use of collector groups allows the pooling of Cloud Proxies into a single group, which can be used to define the appropriate Cloud Proxies to be used per cloud account.

None.

CBO-CDP-CFG-008

Configure each cloud account to use the appropriate collector group per region.

Ensures that region-specific collector groups are used.

None.

CBO-CDP-CFG-009

Apply a vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) anti-affinity rule to the Cloud Proxy appliances.

Using vSphere DRS prevents the Cloud Proxy appliances from running on the same ESXi host and risking the high availability of the collection group.

You must perform additional configuration to set up an anti- affinity rule.

Deployment for Multiple Availability Zones

In an environment with multiple availability zones within a single region, the Cloud Proxy appliances run in the first availability zone. If a failure occurs in the first availability zone, the appliances are failed over to the second availability zone.
Table 2. Design Decisions on the Deployment of the Cloud Proxy Appliances in Multiple Availability Zones.

Decision ID

Design Decision

Design Justification

Design Implication

CBO-CDP-CFG-010

When using two availability zones, add the Cloud Proxy appliances to the VM group of the first availability zone.

Ensures that the Cloud Proxy appliances run in the primary availability zone hosts group.

After the implementation of the second availability zone for the management domain, you must update the VM group for the primary availability zone virtual machines to include the Cloud Proxy appliance.