There are a couple of ways to expand the cluster after you deploy the initial cluster. For example you may want to add a Witness node or a what may be more common a Remote Collector for use in an other Data Center. To achieve this I will show you two ways to do this (I will cover the addition of adding an Application Remote Collector here)
1: You can go to the “admin” page of the cluster (https://fqdn/admin) and select to add a node there by clicking on the green plus in the middle of the page:
It is quite similar to adding a node as above, after you add the node name and node address, select the role, you get a thump info and you have to then enter a password to access the node.
The other way to do it is you go to the web page of the new vRops appliance that you deployed and when prompted with the initial page you select “Expand an existing installation”.
Simply click on next.
Here you enter the node name, select the role and enter the master node address. Click on validate and then accept the certificate you are given.
You enter the admin password here and click on next.
Click finish to complete the installation of the additional node to the cluster.
From the cluster admin page it looks like below while it performs the actions:
After some minutes the operation is completed and we have a remote collector.
The last way I wanted to show you on how to expand a cluster is, for example if you are unavailable but need to deploy this appliance and add it to the cluster but you do not want to hand out the admin password for the cluster or you have delegated the task to a junior administrator, what to do?
Well, on the admin page you can see that there is a small id card icon in the middle above the nodes (to the left). Hovering over it, it says “Generate Passphrase”.
Clicking on it you get the following, you can select hour until expiry. With this you can tell someone to go and deploy the appliance and you should then be able in the options to enter the Passphrase and this will allow the node to be added.
The user who is adding the new appliance to the cluster goes to the web page after deploying it and select expand an existing installation.
On the Getting started page, click next, on the Node Settings and Cluster Info enter the node name, select the role, enter the Master node information and validate the certificate, don’t forget to accept the certificate or you can’t continue 🙂
On the next page is where you would enter the admin password. Here instead you enter the passphrase you generated above, and click next:
Press next and you should get the “Ready to complete screen”
Nice and simple. At the end this is how the environment looks:
Now, the reason I said above that you “should get the “Ready to complete” screen was for me, I did not get this. The slide above is actually a vROps 7.5 screen, where it does work.
After trying a couple of times with vRops 8 nodes I came across this screen below every time and the last screen never appears. After redeploying, the error was the same.
To be continued…