4.6 vSphere environment

To receive replicas of VMs, deploy a new and dedicated vSphere environment, built with several ESXi nodes and a vCenter appliance. Used version in this book is vSphere 6.5.

ESX1
server name	esx1.cloudconnect.local
IP Address	10.10.51.11
Operating System	VMware ESXi 7.0
CPU	12
RAM	128 Gb

ESX2
server name	esx2.cloudconnect.local
IP Address	10.10.51.12
Operating System	VMware ESXi 7.0
CPU	12
RAM	128 Gb

ESX3
server name	esx3.cloudconnect.local
IP Address	10.10.51.13
Operating System	VMware ESXi 7.0
CPU	12
RAM	128 Gb

ESX4
server name	esx4.cloudconnect.local
IP Address	10.10.51.14
Operating System	VMware ESXi 7.0
CPU	12
RAM	128 Gb

The four nodes are grouped into a vSphere cluster where a shared storage is available and visible to all nodes. Also, HA, vMotion and DRS are enabled, so that a failure in one of the nodes doesn’t interrupt the cluster itself and the replication services can continue.

4.19: The vSphere cluster

The cluster is managed by a vCenter appliance:

VCSA
server name	vcsa.cloudconnect.local
IP Address	10.10.51.30
vCPU	4
RAM	12 Gb

Finally, the networking part: In order to manage networking on the virtualized environment better, a distributed switch has been created:

4.20: Networking in the vSphere environment

Each ESXi host has multiple 10 Gb uplinks, connected to the physical switches where the different VLANs are terminated. There are some notable port groups, tagged with VLAN IDs:

• Management (id 51): This is the management network where vCenter, Veeam Backup & Replication and other management machines are deployed. The network is 10.10.51.0/24.
• vcc_dmz (id 111): this is the network where the internal interfaces of the Cloud Gateways are connected. The network is 10.10.111.0/24.
• vcc_public (id 6): This is the network where the public IPs are published. Here there are the three external interfaces of the cloud gateways, and here the external interfaces of the NEAs will be connected.

Any additional port group assigned to a tenant will be created directly over this distributed switch, and a unique VLAN ID will be assigned to it.