Express Installation
The express really is express, it is 4 screens to get a quick setup done without any nitty gritty stuff. Once you have deployed vROps from the OVA and booted it you get the screen as here:
When you select the Express edition you get the following three screens and that is it. I will not go into too much detail about it because each screen speaks for itself and there should not be anything too surprising in those steps. As you can see from the screen it really just offers the setup of the product with no extra thrills.
It is really that simple to get vROps setup in a POC mode and get started diving into the product. Lets however take a look at the “New installation mode” which offers some extra options.
New Installation
You select the New installation instead of the Express installation and off we go, as you can see the new Cluster and so on.
You can select to install a certificate if you have a PEM file ready at hand. I do not in this case and so just go with the default certificate. I will cover the custom certificate part in a separate part.
Next select the master node name and also enter at least one NTP server.
You can opt to enable HA mode and Continuous availability. HA in very short means that the “data nodes” copy the data between them so, so that you won’t lose data in case of a failure of one node.
Continuous Availability is a new feature, it as mentioned requires a Witness node and a Master node plus at least one data node on two Fault Domains.
I hope to explain a bit more about both these points later on. In my case I moved the “Availability mode” button back to not enabled and the whole page is then greyed out.
Next you have the option to add a node during the setup, actually a nice feature which I made use off in my setup. I added a second data node and it went quite smooth, it means you do not have to go in and select the expand the cluster for each node you are adding like in 6.7 and before (where I tried it last). After adding the node you simple get an Info box like below telling you a thumbprint has been enabled. The only thing is you have to deploy the OVA and have it powered on let it get to the first screen above where you select installation method. I could have selected to add my Remote Collector here but I wanted to show the “expand solution” option also below here.
So after this, we are ready to complete and just press finish and things start happening.
You get an info screen about that it’s about to configure the various hosts.
After this you get taken to the admin screen where you can see the cluster is being expanded and slowly everything will be brought to a running state.
Once everything is online your screen should look something like this:
One more note to make here. When you install the first node in the cluster. It is the Master node. Later when you add the second node, this because a data node as you can see above here. If you decide to enable HA, you will be asked to select a data node to use as the replica node. So, your first node is the Master node, the second node is a data node which can be made into a replica node.
If you noticed above there is a warning on the Administrator settings, this is to point out that you should setup password recovery settings. If you have played around with previous versions of vROps you will probably know about a kb about how to reset the root or admin password. This now seems to be possible to do via the web interface (if you have an email server).
That takes us to the end of 2 of the 3 deployment options you are presented with on a new vROps setup.
One final step I would recommend here is, do go and change the root password. Not only will it make your system more secure, it will also mean you are able to patch your vROps system later on. Else you may encounter problems like the one described here.