With this post, I wanted to outline the considerations for deploying vCloud Director cells in a single vs. multi-cell deployment. These considerations are often relevant when moving a deployment from a lab or P.O.C. deployment to a production or build environment. If you come across that isn’t mentioned here, please drop us a comment and add to the list!

‘Transit’ NFS Share

When deploying vCD cells, the NFS share to host the ‘transit’ location is critical. This is used as part of the downloading of vApps, where downloads are streamed to the transit location then downloaded to the destination – to protect or proxy access to the vCenter from the download location. This is not such an issue for multi-cell environments where the transit location is shared, typically on a SAN with enough allocated space. In single cell deployments (as is common in lab set-ups), an important consideration is to size the cell with enough space to stream your largest deployed vApps. (Location of the shared transfer service storage is mounted from $VCLOUD_HOME/data/transfer).

Response Files

Once the initial cell has been installed, a response file is generated with the network and connection details used in the original configuration. This file is saved on the cell at:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/etc/responses.properties

On subsequent installations, the responses file from the first install should be used to ensure that additional installations are consistent. Copy the installation file to a secure location on the network, then as part of the installation, reference the responses file as following:

./installation-file -r path-to-response-file

Load Balancing Cells

With multiple cells, you will certainly need a method of balancing traffic across them. There are several methods of doing this, but so far I have played with:

As soon as I have more information on these, I will update this post with more information.

More thoughts to be added soon…..

Related posts:

  1. Troubleshooting vCloud Director Cells
  2. Building vCloud Director Cells using CentOS6
  3. Ephemeral Ports with VMware vCloud Director 1.5 and vSphere 5
  4. 503 Errors and vCloud Director
  5. Why Consume Single Zone Clouds?