Automating your VMware location setup with a Schematics template
Automate your VMware Virtual Cloud Director setup with templates that use IBM Cloud® Schematics to create a Satellite location, provision hosts in your VMware Cloud Director (VCD) account, and set up the Satellite location control plane for you.
You can clone and modify these Terraform templates from the Satellite Terraform GitHub repository.
For IBM Cloud Satellite to perform actions on your behalf in a cloud provider, you must provide credentials to the cloud provider. The credentials that you provide are stored and encrypted in etcd of the Satellite location management plane. For more information, see Securing your data.
Before you begin
Before you can run the template, you must gather information about your VMware Virtual Data Centers (VDC) instance.
General information
To connect Satellite to your VMware Virtual Data Centers (VDC), you need the following values. To find these values, see VMware credentials.
| Value | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| VCD user ID | The VMware Cloud Director username. | admin |
| VCD password | The VMware Cloud Director password. | <password> |
| VCD org name | The VMware organization name. | 0ff080abcdef123456789abcd12345678 |
| VCD URL | The VMware Cloud Director URL | https://daldir01.vmware-solutions.cloud.ibm.com/api |
| VCD name | The VMware Cloud Director virtual data center name | vmware-satellite |
Networking information
Your VMware data center must include a routed network. You can also include an edge gateway that is configured and enabled with distributed routing and DHCP. If you include the edge gateway name, then firewall rules are created for full outbound connectivity and a SNAT rule is created for mapping to an external IP address.
Include the following values when you run the template.
| Name | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| VCD DHCP network name | The name of the network pre-dconfigured for the environment. | my-network |
| VCD edge gateway name | The name of the edge network configured in the environment. This value is optional. | edge-dal10-12345678 |
Creating your location with an Schematics template
Before you begin, make sure that you have the correct IBM Cloud permissions to create locations, including to Satellite and Schematics. To create the template and manage its resources, Satellite automatically creates an IBM Cloud IAM API key. You can optionally provide the value of an existing API key that has the correct permissions in the same account.
Do not reuse the same name for multiple locations, even after the other location is deleted. If you use the same name 5 times or more within 7 days, you might reach the Let's Encrypt Duplicate Certificate rate limit.
- Gather all the required values.
- From the Satellite console, click Create location.
- In the Setup section, click VMware Cloud Director.
- Enter the values that you previously collected.
- Review the Satellite location details.
- In the Summary pane, review the cost estimate.
- Click Create location. Your location might take about 30 minutes to finish provisioning.
- Optional: To review the provisioning progress, review the logs in the Schematics workspace that is automatically created for you.
- Click Manage in Schematics. If you see an error, navigate to the Schematics workspaces console and click the name of your workspace,
such as
us.east.cartOrder.... - From the Activity tab, find the current activity row and click View log to review the log details.
- Wait for the Schematics action to finish and the workspace to enter an Active state.
- Click Manage in Schematics. If you see an error, navigate to the Schematics workspaces console and click the name of your workspace,
such as
Well done, your Satellite location is creating! You can review the Satellite console to see when your location is in a Normal state and ready to use.
What does this template create?
The following resources are created by the template in your VMware data center.
- Control plane virtual machines (8 CPU, 32GB RAM, 100GB primary disk)
- Worker virtual machines (4 CPU, 16GB RAM, 25GB primary disk, 100GB secondary disk)
- Storage virtual machines (16 CPU, 64GB RAM, 25GB primary disk, 100GB secondary disk, 500GB tertiary disk). The specs for the storage VMs are configurable in the Terraform variables.
The following resources are created by the template in your IBM Cloud account.
- 1 Satellite location.
- 3 Satellite hosts that represent the VMware virtual machines, attached to the location, and assigned to the Satellite location control plane.
- 3 Satellite hosts that represent the VMware virtual machines, attached to the location, unassigned, and available to use for services.
If you are using this template for demonstration purposes, do not assign all your hosts to your control plane. Hosts that are assigned to the control plane cannot be used for other purposes, such as worker nodes for your cluster. For more information, see Understanding Satellite locations.
VMware credentials
Retrieve the VMWare credentials that Satellite can use to create Satellite resources in your VMWare cloud on your behalf.
- Verify that you have the required permissions in your VMWare account to create a Satellite location from a template.
- Identify or create a user with Administrator role.
- Find your network information.
- Provide this information on the VMware Cloud Director template.
I created a Satellite location, what's next?
Now that your Satellite location is set up, you are ready to start using IBM Cloud services.
- Add compute capacity to your location by attaching more hosts to the location so that you can run Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud service.
- Create a Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud service, such as a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. You assign the additional hosts that you previously attached as worker nodes to provide the compute power for the cluster. You can even register existing Red Hat OpenShift clusters to your location to use as deployment targets.
- Manage your applications with Satellite Config.
- Create Satellite cluster storage templates.
- Learn more about the Satellite Link component and how you can use endpoints to manage the network traffic between your location and IBM Cloud.
Need help? Check out Getting support where you can find information about cloud status, issues, and logging; contacting support; and setting your email notification preferences for IBM Cloud platform-related items.