Integrating vCenter for Contrail
These topics provide instructions for integrating Contrail Release 5.1.x and microservices with VMware vCenter.
Prerequisites
Before you start the integration, ensure that the contrail controller meets the prerequisites given in Server Requirements and Supported Platforms.
Follow these steps to prepare Contrail controller(s):
yum update -y yum install -y yum-plugin-priorities https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm yum install -y python-pip git gcc python-devel sshpass yum install -y git pip install “ansible==2.5.0” pyvmomi
ESX Agent Manager
VMware provides a standard vCenter solution called vSphere ESX Agent Manager (EAM), that allows you to deploy, monitor, and manage ContrailVMs on ESXi hosts.
The ContrailVM is deployed as an Agent VM that is monitored by EAM. With this integration, ContrailVMs are marked as more critical and privileged than other tenant VMs on the host.
The following are the benefits of running ContrailVM as an AgentVM from EAM:
Auto-deploy ContrailVMs on ESXi hosts in scope (clusters).
Manage and Monitor ContrailVMs through EAM in the vSphere web client.
Integrate with other vCenter features like AddHos, Maintenance Mode, vSphere DRS, vSphere DPM, and VMWare HA.
These topics provide instructions for integrating Contrail Release 5.1.x and microservices with VMware vCenter.
Set Up vCenter Server
Follow these steps to set up the vCenter server.
Configure Contrail Parameters
Populate the file config/instances.yaml with Contrail roles.
For an example file, see contrail-ansible-deployer/confing/instances.yaml.vcenter_example.
Install Contrail
Install Contrail by running the following Contrail playbooks:
ansible-playbook -i inventory/ -e orchestrator=vcenter playbooks/configure_instances.yml ansible-playbook -i inventory/ -e orchestrator=vcenter playbooks/install_contrail.yml
Monitor and Manage ContrailVM from ESX Agent Manager
ContrailVMs can be monitored from EAM by using ContrailVM-Agency.
Follow these steps to monitor and manage Contrail VM from EAM: