Multi-Instance Management in my VCF Lab

Multi-Instance Management (VCF Federation) allows you to monitor and manage multiple VMware Cloud Foundation instances from a single console. You can view inventory across the VMware Cloud Foundation instances in the federation as well as the available and used capacity. You can also see if any patches are ready to be installed in any of the instances.

I won’t go too much into details here but focus on showing you how I got this working in my lab.

Here are the steps I did to federate two VCF instances.
Sorry for not using a proper naming convention, but hopefully you will be able to follow along.

Deployed my first VCF instance using VLC Automated mode with the default settings.

2. Deployed my second VCF instance using VLC Automated mode but changed the following in AUTOMATED_AVN_VCF_VLAN_10-13_NOLIC_v42.json: IP addresses, VLAN IDs, domain, subdomain, and hostnames.

3. Added another vNIC to my Jump Host and tagged it with the Main VLAN ID for my second instance (100). Assigned it the Ext GW IP (10.0.2.1).

4. Installed the DNS Server Role on my Jump Host and configured one conditional forwarder pointing to each of my Cloud Builder appliances to allow name resolution across both instances.

5. Configured Deadwood, which is the recursive DNS daemon (service) for MaraDNS, to forward queries to my Jump Host. This was done by editing /etc/dwood3rc and then restarting the maradns.deadwood service on the Cloud Builder appliances in each VCF instance.

bind_address = "10.0.0.221"
chroot_dir = "/etc/maradns"
upstream_servers = {}
upstream_servers["."]="8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4"
upstream_servers["0.0.10.in-addr.arpa."] = "127.0.0.1"
upstream_servers["0.50.10.in-addr.arpa."] = "127.0.0.1"
upstream_servers["0.60.10.in-addr.arpa."] = "127.0.0.1"
upstream_servers["vcf.sddc.lab."] = "127.0.0.1"
upstream_servers["2.0.10.in-addr.arpa."] = "10.0.0.1"
upstream_servers["vcf.nils.lab."] = "10.0.0.1"
recursive_acl = "10.0.0.0/24,10.50.0.0/24,10.60.0.0/24"
filter_rfc1918 = 0


bind_address = "10.0.2.221"
chroot_dir = "/etc/maradns"
upstream_servers = {}
upstream_servers["."]="8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4"
upstream_servers["2.0.10.in-addr.arpa."] = "127.0.0.1"
upstream_servers["0.55.10.in-addr.arpa."] = "127.0.0.1"
upstream_servers["0.66.10.in-addr.arpa."] = "127.0.0.1"
upstream_servers["vcf.nils.lab."] = "127.0.0.1"
upstream_servers["0.0.10.in-addr.arpa."] = "10.0.2.1"
upstream_servers["vcf.sddc.lab."] = "10.0.2.1"
recursive_acl = "10.0.2.0/24,10.55.0.0/24,10.66.0.0/24"
filter_rfc1918 = 0

6. Replaced the certificates for SDDC Manager in both instances.