Skip to main content

How to change the NSXT formfactor during the VCF deployments

Image
By

Welcome back to my blog.

Hope everyone doing great. 

In this blog, I would like to explain about how to change the NSXT deployment size during the VCF workload domain deployment.

By default in VCF workload domain deployment phase, it deploys 3 NSXT Managers with large formfactor.


credits: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX-T-Data-Center/3.2/installation/GUID-AECA2EE0-90FC-48C4-8EDB-66517ACFE415.html 

In the above diagram we can see the NSX-T Large formfactor requires 48GB of memory and 12 vCPU for each NSXT Manager. 

In VCF, NSXT-Managers for VI workload domains will be placed on Management domain cluster.

When I am practicing lab, none of the hosts in my management cluster have the required memory and cpu available for NSX-T Manager large formfactor. so my VI domain deployment workflow is keep on failing and keeps deleting the downloaded NSX-T OVA files and eventually failed.

I have followed below steps to workaround this problem

1. I have taken the copy of /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties 

cp -p /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties-old

added the below custom parameters based on your requirement

nsxt.manager.formfactor=small

nsxt.manager.formfactor=medium

nsxt.management.resources.validation.skip=true

added if you want to deploy single NSX-T Manager then you can add below custom parameter

nsxt.manager.cluster.size=1

2. restart domain manager service 

systemctl restart domainmanager

3. confirm the service is restart and running status

systemctl status domainmanager

4. Retry the failed workflow , this time SDDC Manager checks the updated paramters and deploy small or medium NSXT Manager cluster.

The same workaround can be useful in both native VCF and VCF on VxRail deployments.


Note: In production environments, it is recommended to go with NSX-T Manager large formfactor

for additional guidelines on the sizing, please refer NSXT documentation.

  • You can use the Extra Small VM resource size only for the Cloud Service Manager appliance (CSM). Deploy CSM in the Extra Small VM size or higher, as required. See Overview of Deploying NSX Cloud for more information. 

  • The NSX Manager Small VM appliance size is suitable for lab and proof-of-concept deployments, and must not be used in production.

  • The NSX Manager Medium VM appliance size is the autoselected appliance size during deployment and is suitable for typical production environments. An NSX-T management cluster formed using this appliance size can support up to 128 hypervisors. Starting with NSX-T 3.1, a single NSX Manager cluster is supported.

  • The NSX Manager Large VM appliance size is suitable for large-scale deployments. An NSX-T management cluster formed using this appliance size can support more than 128 hypervisors.

For maximum scale using the NSX Manager Large VM appliance size, go to the VMware Configuration Maximums tool at https://configmax.vmware.com/guest and select NSX-T Data Center from the product list.



Popular posts from this blog

SDDC Manager Command line overview-part 1

By
In this blog, we will discuss about sddc manager and what are the command line options we have what we can do in command line. Sddc manager is the core component in VCF environment. It is responsible for doing many different tasks related to your VCF inventory configuration, life cycle management, security etc. Commission/decommission the hosts Deploying new workload domains  Expanding the clusters or adding new clusters to workload domain Configure network pools for host networks (Management, Storage(VSAN/NFS etc) Deploying vRealize suite of products Certificate and password management  Life cycle Management NSX-T Edge/AVNs deployment Usually all these tasks can be carried out from GUI, VCF admins rarely login sddc manager mostly when the VMware GSS is involved. SDDC Manager command line provides different use cases for example: monitoring the logs  looking up for passwords collecting logs do command line health checks etc How to access sddc manager CLI? There are two us...
Read more

SDDC Manager Command line overview-part 2

By
Welcome back. Hope you all doing great. In the previous blog   we discussed about how to access sddc manager, what are the different logs in sddc manager. In this blog we will discuss about SOS tool. There is a tool called SOS (Supportability and serviceability utility) tool in sddc manager  It is available in this location /opt/vmware/sddc-support To run sos tool you need to change as root or run with sudo  When you run sos tool with -h (--help) option it will show tool usage ./sos --help Sos tool is useful to do multiple tasks, we will look into following examples to understand SOS and its usage. Health checks  Log collection Enable disable ssh for esxi nodes or vcenter servers Get host IP address details  -- Running health check for a specific workload domain, if you didn’t specify the domain-name option then health check will run on all the available workload domains. ./sos --health-check --domain-name nameofthedomain Once the health check completes, it...
Read more