I wanted to go over, how to setup Log Insight (vRLI) and your options here.
Normally for vRLI you will deploy one or three nodes. One for stand alone and 3 for clustering. This is a requirement from VMwares side. You have a three node cluster for higher density environments where you need to spread the load.
My plan is to end up with one vRLI server per site in my lab but for the interest of documenting it I will deploy one cluster for the one site, just to show how it is done. I will not go into the deployment of the OVA itself since it is relatively self explanatory but rather the configuration post OVA deployment. For sizing please check the sizing calculator here. For this reason the cluster setup below will only cover the configuration and then adding the nodes and configuring the load-balancer.
You need a total of 4 IP addresses for the Cluster setup, which it might be good to have from the start. The three are for the OVAs and the last one is for the load-balancer. It used to be that you would have an external load-balancer for VRLI but this is no longer supported so you configure the LB properties inside VRLI.
Single node deployment
You will be met with a welcome screen, click on next.
Select your deployment type. Here we want “Start new deployment”.
enter the password and if applicable an email of the administrator, and hit save and Continue.
Then if you want system notifications you can enter an email or if you want to send HTTP notifications, enter a URL to send them to. Then hit save and continue.
Next is the configuration of the SMTP. The Log insight server can send emails already but if you have an external mail servers you can configure it here and also send a test email.
That is pretty much it, hit Finish to let the vRLI server go and do it’s thing.
Once it is done you will get prompted to start importing data. I will leave this for now and do it in a later post.
Cluster deployment
After you deploy the three appliances, power them on, decide which ones is going to be the master node and log into that node using the FQDN of the appliance. Wait until you can reach the interface of all three appliances and then log onto the appliance you want to use as a master. Configure it as above in the Single node deployment. Go to the second log insight node, again you are met with the welcome screen, unlike above you should join an existing deployment.
That takes you to the following page, fill in the details and click on go.
You will get the information that the join request was successfully received and you can click on the link to go to the Cluster Management page.
This will take you to https://fqdn/admin/cluster where you should see a request for a node to join. Click on Allow.
You get a couple of things that you should keep in mind such as DNS and NTP. Also note that it is recommended to have a load balancer enabled, we will do this in just a moment, lets finish the cluster though by adding the third node, which is done by doing the same steps as above here.
Now we have the three node we require, lets go and also just configure the virtual IP address.
Note that external load-balancer is not supported.
And that is it. We have our three nodes, and load-balancer configured.
