vSphere¶

VMware vSphere 4 or newer is recommended.

Initial Setup¶

Obtain vSphere and follow the installation instructions.

Note

VMware Tools is not pre-installed on the Helion Stackato VM because of potential incompatibilities with different hypervisor versions. If you wish to install VMware Tools on the Helion Stackato VM, make sure the version matches your ESX/ESXi version.

Configuration¶

Unlike the Helion Stackato micro cloud in other environments, the vSphere VM does not broadcast the stackato-xxxx.local hostname via multicast DNS, and it may not have the default api.stackato-xxxx.local and stackato-xxxx.local entries in the /etc/hosts file.

The hostname can be changed as per the steps in Changing the Hostname.
To verify the contents of /etc/hosts see Modifying /etc/hosts.
Network DNS entries may be added as outlined in the DNS section.

vSphere Cloning¶

To create a cluster of Helion Stackato VMs with vSphere:

Import the Helion Stackato OVA.
Clone the resulting Helion Stackato VM to create as many nodes as you need for your cluster.
Start the cloned Helion Stackato VMs.
Run the appropriate kato node attach commands on the cloned nodes to configure their roles.

See the Cluster Setup and Assigning roles with kato sections for details on roles and the kato node attach and kato role add commands.

To scale the cluster (to add additional DEAs for example), follow the last three steps for each additional node, running the kato node attach command to assign the needed role and pointing it to the primary node.