Tuesday, June 30, 2015

ManageIQ with vSphere: Deploy and Configure

ManageIQ is company that Red Hat acquired in 2012. ManageIQ created a cloud management program by the same name, which is available with a Red Hat subscription as CloudForms. ManageIQ provides a single pane of glass for the unified management of infrastructure resources. It can manage vSphere, Hyper-V, RedHat, OpenStack, and Amazon EC2 environments.

ManageIQ was made open source last summer; since it is a free download, I decided to try it out in my lab environment. I have it managing my vSphere lab infrastructure and my Amazon EC2 account.

The deployment couldn't be much easier; you go to http://manageiq.org/download/ and click on VMware vSphere.


You then follow the three step instructions to deploy the appliance in your vSphere environment and start collecting information.



I logged into my vSphere Client, then clicked on File and Deploy OVF Template. In the Deploy from a file or URL field, I paste the URL that I copied from the ManageIQ download page, which is http://manageiq.org/download/manageiq-vsphere-stable.ova and walk through the process of deploying the ManageIQ appliance.


Once the appliance has been deployed, I open up a browser and connect to the appliance with the IP address. I then enter the default username of admin with the default password smartvm to log into the ManageIQ appliance for the first time.


The next step is configuring the appliance. This is going to be found on Configure on the top ribbon and then the Configuration link. You are going to want to select your Default Zone that was created when it was deployed, that is the highlighted item in the image below on the Settings window.

The options I am going to modify are:

  • Company Name
  • Appliance Name
  • Application Time Zone
  • NTP Servers


I am also going to check off 3 additional Server Controls:

  • Capacity & Utilization Coordinator
  • Capacity & Utilization Data Collector
  • Capacity & Utilization Data Processor

The Capacity & Utilization settings collect usage data. For example, if we select to collect data from a cluster, you are choosing to collect data for all hosts and virtual machines that are part of that cluster.
 


For authentication, I wanted to use my home.virtlab.com domain; I clicked on the Authentication tab and entered my LDAP information.

If you do not check Get User Groups from LDAP, the user must be defined in the VMDB using the console where the User ID is the same as the users name in your directory service typed in lowercase. For example, when using User Principal Name for my account it is cn=jason gaudreau,ou=users,dc=home,dc=virtlab,dc=com (CN=and when using Distinguished Name for my account it is uid=jason gaudreau,ou=users,dc=home,dc=virtlab,dc=com (UID=). Then, when logging in, the user would type either jgaudreau (User Principal Name) or jason gaudreau (Distinguished Name). If the user is not defined in the VMDB, they will be denied access to ManageIQ Management Engine.

Suffice it to say, it is much easier to enable Get User form LDAP.


Now we are going to add our LDAP group as a super administrator to the appliance, we are going to click on Access Control, which should be at the very bottom left side of the screen after the Settings. Select Groups, then click the Configuration down-down menu and click Add a new Group.


We are going to provide a description for our new group, I am going to call mine Administrators, click the (Look Up LDAP Groups) option, and select the Role EvmRole-super-administrator.

Under the LDAP Group Look Up, you are going to search on an account that is a member of the group you want to add; in my case, I look up jgaudreau. You then enter the user account and password that has access to Active Directory.


When you hit Retrieve, another field will show up for LDAP Groups for User. These are the groups that my account is a member of in Active Directory. I am going to select Administrators and then click the Add button at the bottom of the screen.


Before we leave Access Control, we should change the password for the default Administrator account.

The last step for today's post is configuring our Capacity & Utilization Collection. We are going to go back to the Settings option and then highlight the very first entry, which should be your default region. Next click on the C & U Collection tab. Because I am going to be adding an Amazon EC2 provider, I click on the Collect for All Clusters option for Clusters; and Collect for All Datastores option for Datastores. After I add my Infrastructure and Cloud Providers, it will start gathering information.


In my next post, I will go through adding the Providers into ManageIQ, which gives you the ability to manage hosts and virtual machines.
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