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 8.

Server	ESX1	ESX2	ESX3	ESX4
server name	esx1.cloudconnect.local	esx2.cloudconnect.local	esx3.cloudconnect.local	esx4.cloudconnect.local
IP Address	172.27.217.161	172.27.217.162	172.27.217.163	172.27.217.164
CPU	12 cores
Memory	128 GB
Operating System	VMware ESXi 8

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.

The cluster is managed by a vCenter appliance:

VCSA
server name	vcenter.cloudconnect.local
IP Address	172.27.217.71
vCPU	4
RAM	16 Gb

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

4.16: Networking in the vSphere environment

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

• vcc-mgmt (id 217, untagged): This is the management network where vCenter, Veeam Backup & Replication and other management machines are deployed. The network is 172.27.217.0/24.
• vcc-dmz (id 218): this is the network where the internal interfaces of the Cloud Gateways are connected. The network is 172.27.218.0/24.
• DPG-test_net (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.

NOTE: The name Test Net comes from rfc5737 - IPv4 Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation. Quoting the document: “The blocks 192.0.2.0/24 (TEST-NET-1), 198.51.100.0/24 (TEST-NET-2), and 203.0.113.0/24 (TEST-NET-3) are provided for use in documentation.”

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. You can notice in the screenshot VLAN ID 1000, the very first port group created for a vSphere tenant.