Deploying the VMware Cloud Director Availability On-premises Appliance

Introduction

To pair your on-premise environment with Cloudist Disaster Recovery you must download, deploy and configure the VMware Cloud Director Availability On-premises Appliance.

Once deployed and paired, you can migrate, protect or failover virtual machines from your on-premise vSphere environment to the Cloudist VDC service.

Prerequisites

You must be onboarded in the Cloudist Portal and have:
- A provisioned Virtual Data Center in the Cloudist VDC service
- Your customer/organization number
- Your username and password

To create a specific account to use for DR purposes:

Log in to https://portal.cloudist.se
Select Virtual Data Center service

Select the Virtual Datacenter you would like to create the account in
Click the name of the Virtual Datacenter to open Cloud Director UI
Once the Cloud Director UI launches, go to Administration
Select New
Enter a username, password and ensure the User has the Organization Administrator role
Click Save

The username in this example when using DRaaS would be drservice@12345-5678 (your org number)

You must have vSphere administrator privileges in your on-prem environment
You must
- Download the VMware Cloud Director Availability On-premises Appliance
- Deploy the Ovf template

Pairing with Cloudist VDC Availability

Once you have deployed the VMware Cloud Director Availability On-premises Appliance, go to the https://<assigned ip>/admin url

You can verify this via the console of the appliance:

Log into the admin UI with the root user and password set when deploying the ovf template
Change the Password

Select Run initial setup wizard

Enter the Lookup Service Address of your on-premise environment
Enter the SSO Admin Username and Password

Click Next and Accept the certificate

Enter your Customer Number as the Site Name and click Next

Configure the Cloud Service Details

Service Endpoint address is the Cloudist VDC region you would like to pair with:
- https://sec1-availability.cloudist.solutions:443 (Sweden Central)
- https://sen1-availability.cloudist.solutions:443 (Sweden North)
Organization Admin is your Cloudist Portal username@customer/organization number
Organization Password is your Cloudist Portal password
Choose whether to Allow Access from Cloud

By selecting this option, you allow Cloudist Solutions and the organization administrators without authenticating to the on-premises site to perform operations from the Cloudist VDC Availability UI:

Discover on-premises workloads and replicate them to the cloud.
Reverse existing replications to the on-premises site.
Replicate cloud workloads to the on-premises site.

Click Next

Accept the certificate

Join/Ignore VMware's Customer Experience Improvement Program
Review the details of the Ready To Complete page and click Finish
- You can also at this point choose configure local placement. This is required before performing replications but can be be configured later.