*UPDATED 4/19/13 FOR RHEL6* SCROLL TO END OF ARTICLE

This has been a fun project because I'm a n00b at Linux. If you know a better way of implementing this, please let me know. Most of the walkthroughs you find online about setting up a vCloud Director Cell (such as yellow-bricks) talk about just turning the firewall off completely or they completely skip this step. I see why now. There are a bunch of services that need to talk not only to other vCloud Cells, but to other services all around the datacenter.

The VMware vCloud Installation and Configuration Guide shows us what ports need to be open, but I came up with a few different kinds of implementation scenarios.

The first thing you need to do during the initial setup is to make sure the Firewall is enabled and turn off any services that are checkmarked by default (SSH should be our only default)

Attachments:

RHEL-Firewall-More-Secure.txt	[ ]	5 Kb	18/11/11 16:00
RHEL-Firewall-Public-vCD-Cell.txt	[ ]	6 Kb	18/11/11 16:00
RHEL-Firewall-Simple.txt	[ ]	3 Kb	18/11/11 16:00
RHEL6-Simple.txt	[ ]	3 Kb	19/04/13 11:36

One of my most popular articles (that I even turn to from time to time) is How To Install VMware vCloud Director 5.1 & 1.5 From Beginning to End. The article focused on installing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5. Since RHEL 6 is now a supported OS, it's time for an update. RHEL 6 does not have a GUI installed. So the install process is a bit different, but not far off. You just have to know what you are doing with the CLI.

Many of these steps follow the same steps as the original article, but need to be tweaked slightly.

Step 1. Prepare the environment.

Part A. Database. For an Oracle setup, you're on your own because I don't do Oracle, sorry. Though, since vCloud Director 1.5 supports Microsoft SQL Server, it makes my life much easier. Follow the step by step Installing vCloud Director 1.5 With SQL Server 2008.

Part B. DNS and IPs. Each vCloud Director Cell will need, at minimum, 2 IP addresses. The DNS names associated with those are going to be for the https request and the vmrc.  so VCD-CELL01.company.com and VCD-CELL01-RC.company.com. Repeat this for as many cells as you have. In this case, we will be using 2 cells for redundancy. You may need an additional IP/DNS addition for your cells if you plan on publishing your portal to the internet. See step 3 for the information.

Part C. Syslog. vCloud Cells have the capability to export syslogs. Make sure you have a syslog server setup prior to installation.