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Onboarding experience of VMware ON AWS in Production Environment-Part2

 VMware ON AWS Deployment - Requirements. 

As mentioned in the previous post , when we are set with the project objective, we need to prepare the items mentioned in the VMC deployment checklist. Some of the basic requirements are, 

  1. The AWS account details - When we deploy our SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS, it is created within an AWS account and a VPC dedicated to your organisation and managed by VMware. We must also connect the SDDC to an AWS account belonging to us, called the customer AWS account . This connection allows our SDDC to access AWS services belonging to our org  account.
  2. SDDC Management subnets - This is the most critical part of the deployment. Choosing the right network for SDDC and connect back to ON-Premise network (check with network team to make sure you provide unique range of CIDR, ASN etc to avoid conflicts) 
  3. Connectivity to On-Premise DC and VMC - There are different ways to connect to the On-Prem DC, using IPsec VPN, AWS Direct Connect, Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) /HCX Connector, or custom MPLS, network backend connections. ( example AT &T Netbond) 
  4. Region where we deploy the VMC SDDC stack ( we need to choose from AWS Regions) 
  5. Cluster type - We have an option to choose either Stretched or non-Stretched Cluster 
  6. Number of hosts do we need in the SDDC cluster ( remember we can start from 1 host but the recommended settings for production cluster is minimum of 3 nodes ) 

Getting Started with Deployment: 

Once we have the AWS account details ready, we need to provide that to the VMware backend team to provide us with the subscription. These subscriptions are mapped to our AWS account and ENI's to be attached at the later stage of this deployment 

Once we have a "Welcome" email from VMware, we are ready to go with the deployment. Login to VMC console and click on "Create SDDC" and provide the details as captured in the deployment checklist. 

The SDDC Stack deployment is fully automated and the creation of Datacenter, Cluster, addition of nodes, creation and configuration of vSAN datastore, deployment of NSX Components, etc are fully automatic. 

The wait of approx 2 hours would results us with the fully working setup. 

Post deployment Steps: 

Once the deployment is successful login to vmc.vmware.com console to perform the next steps. 

1. The landing page : In this page, we can check the summary of our deployed SDDC components, region where we deployed the stack, etc. 


2. Click on View details to review the connectivity details and configuration page. Note: The connection to on-premise is not yet done - we need to perform additional steps which we cover in the following sections of the blog post. 


3. VMC Network diagram : 

Below is a more detailed view of how NSX is deployed within VMware Cloud on AWS (diagram courtesy of Gilles Chekroun)


We will see how to connect to ON-Premise datacenter from our VMC setup in our next blog post 

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