Summary
VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova is a Fling built on top of VCF that provides the users the ability to perform Power Operations (Power ON, Power OFF) seamlessly across the entire inventory. It has a sleek UI to visualize the entire VCF inventory (which is the first of its kind for VCF) across the domains of VCF.
The UI is easy to use and elucidates the current Health and Power State of each node in the VCF inventory. Powernova lets the user work on the Power Operations on the components with domain specific inter dependencies automatically resolved.
Powernova also performs valid health checks on all nodes in the VCF inventory to ensure Power Operations are performed only on healthy nodes. Powernova takes minimal input (4 user defined inputs on their VCF system) and does all the magic for the users behind the scenes.
If any infrastructure maintenance activity, VCF migration activity, or power operations need to be performed only on specific domains in VCF, then Powernova is the one stop solution for all VCF users.
Requirements
- Compatible with VCF 4.1 and VCF 4.2 versions.
- Deploy the VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova OVA on the Management vCenter of SDDC Manager.
- Reserve a Valid IP Address and FQDN for VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova node and make appropriate DNS record for the same.
- Any of the latest versions of Chrome/Firefox/Opera browser.
- VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova is built for VSRN and does not have support yet for vXRail Hosts
- VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova does not have support yet for WCP/Tanzu configured Workload Domains.
- VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova does not have support yet for Nested ESXI Hosts.
Instructions
- Download the OVA attached in this Fling and deploy it on the Management vCenter of SDDC Manager.
- Power ON the deployed OVA.
- Login via vCenter Remote Console using credentials root/VMware123!
- Edit Network configurations by providing valid Gateway, IP Address [IP Address/24] and DNS in /etc/systemd/network/10-eth0-en.network file. (See attached image-1)
- Configure the Hostname using the command hostnamectl set-hostname HostName
- Restart the following services to reflect the IP Address and Hostname on the vApp.
systemctl restart systemd-networkd
systemctl restart systemd-resolved
- Do a PING check to Sddc Manager using ping -a SddcManagerHostName. The PING should be successful.
- Start Powernova Service
cd /opt/vmware/powernova
./startup.sh
- The output from the script should look like this (See attached image-2)
- Once the service is up and running. Open your browser and login to the url https://<powernova-hostname>
- Provide the following inputs
Enter the VCF Hostname in the Host name field
Click on Verify Certificate Link
Verify the Certificate Thumbprint and Click on Accept
Enter the VCF SSO Username in Username field
Enter the VCF SSO Password in the User Password field
Enter the VCF Root Password in the Root User Password field
Click on Submit
Additional Information
- By default VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova is deployed using self-signed certificates. If the user wants to configure CA certificates then they can place the cert.pem and key.pem files in /opt/vmware/powernova location and start the Powernova Service as mentioned above.
- If the Workload Domain Inventory is large (more than 1500 ESXI Hosts) expect the first screen load of Inventory to take around 4 mins to load.
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