Deploying vSphere 6.5 Update 2 Platform Services Controller (PSC) and vCenter in an HA configuration [Part 1]
This will be the first part of deploying your vSphere 6.5 Update 2 Platform Services Controller (PSC) and vCenter in an HA configuration. We will walk through the entire setup starting with the Platform Services Controllers (PSCs) and then move on to deploying vCenter and configuring the HA environment.
Video Demonstration and Discussion
Must haves
- DNS for every system (this includes the reverse DNS) – All of your PSC and vCenter deployments along with the VIP on your load balancers need this setup before you start
- NTP
- Secondary VLAN for the Private Network between vCenter servers and the Witness server (this VLAN must be different than the VLAN used for the management of vCenter)
- Load Balancers need to be up and ready. There are only three load balancers that are supported by VMware: NetScaler, F5 and NSX. Your configuration is unsupported if you use another load balancer (even if it works). VMware actually does a decent job of going through each of these configurations:
- Some of the articles talk about putting certificates on your Load Balancers. This is not required. SSL Passthrough (which means you don’t have certs on the load balancers) is a supported configuration. Within this document, I will be doing SSL Passthrough.
- One thing you should note and not miss, is that the Timeout (or stickiness) of the connections within the load balancers needs to be set to 1440 seconds. The issue, especially with the deployment, is if this is not set, the deploy can fail if it tries to hit one PSC and then at a later time, hits the other PSC. I’ve even gone so far as to shutdown one PSC at a site during the deployment to make sure I don’t have to rebuild 🙂
Deploying the Platform Services Controllers (PSCs)
This process is covered here: VMware vSphere 6.5 Read the rest →