automation

VMware Workstation Gen 9: BOM2 P5 Expanding VCF9 by adding a 4th Node

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The first 3 Nodes in my VCF9 deployment worked well for the load I placed on BOM1. However, in BOM2 I plan to install more of the VCF9 Management Components, namely VCF Automation. With this expansion comes a strong demand on resources (CPU, RAM, and Disk). Though BOM2 has plenty of resources, Workstation has a limit of 128GB of RAM per ESX VM. In this blog post I’ll show you how I adjusted the BOM1 VMs and created the 4th node.

Note: There really isn’t a playbook or documentation for what I am attempting to do with Workstation, VCF 9, and BOM2. I’m pushing it beyond its limits and it’s going to be a bit of hit or miss. As I move forward these blogs may be updated or corrected.

Calculating VM Load Requirements

I need to align my ESX VMs to the load I’m about to put on them. Using the table below, I calculate the total load of vCPU, RAM, and disk I’ll need to support ONE Node of each component.

If I deploy a single node from each management component I’ll need to plan for the following load:

  • RAM: ~250
  • vCPU: ~70
  • Disk: ~5.2TB

To meet these requirements, the plan is to have 4 Nested ESX Hosts, each with the following settings.

  • 4 x ESX 9 Hosts
  • 2 CPU / 14 Cores
  • 128GB RAM
  • 142 GB NVMe Boot
  • 4 x 860GB NVMe vSAN
  • 8 x vNICs

Nested ESX Host Adjustments:

My deployment currently has 3 ESX nested Hosts: VCF9111, VCF9112, and VCF9113. I make the following changes to them:

  • CPU: I am going with 2 Processors with 14 cores per processor
  • RAM: I set each of the Nested ESX Hosts to 128GB. This is their max setting.

Creation of VCF9114

VCF9114 is going to be deployed a bit differently than the other ESX hosts. The other ESX hosts were deployed on 2 x 2TB NVMe physical disks and their virtual disks were spread across them. Using what I had on hand I divided VCF9114 virtual disks as follows.

Its virtual BOOT Disk will reside on Optane2 and its 4 vSAN ESA virtual disks will reside on one of the four 1TB NVMe physical disks. Spreading the virtual disks to separate physical drives helps with overall performance.

I created the following folders to support the disk layout for VCF9114.

Next I deploy the ESX Template and create VCF9114.

  1. Create VM from Template: I follow my blog under the section Deploy the ESX Template to do so.
  2. Install ESX and configure: I follow my blog and complete this task

Next is to add the 4th node to the vSphere cluster, but I’ll cover that in my next blog post.

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