Preparing Vmware Platform9 Vmware Vsphere Prerequisites

Following are the prerequisites for deploying your Platform9 Managed OpenStack (PMO) cloud with VMware vSphere.

• A single VMware vCenter environment - PMO requires a vCenter Management server to communicate with your vSphere environment.

• One or more VMware vSphere Clusters with DRS enabled, fully automated, located in the vCenter environment - PMO treats your vCenter clusters as hosts or hypervisors. The vSphere clusters must have DRS enabled and configured in the fully automated mode for the integration to work. This enables PMO to deploy a virtual machine on a cluster, allowing DRS running on that cluster to find the appropriate ESXi hosts to place the VM on.

Warning

DRS enabled clusters are a requirement for PMO. If you need to use PMO without DRS enablement, you will need to ensure that your clusters have only 1 host in them.

• One or more VMware vSphere datastores that the clusters have access to - The clusters chosen to work with PMO should have access to these datastores.

• One or more VMware vSphere templates to act as images for your Glance image catalog - PMO offers built-in support for templates. All you need to do is copy over the templates you’d like to make part of PMO’s image catalog onto the datastore(s) you are giving PMO access to. PMO will discovery any templates it can find on these datastores and report them to be part of your image catalog.

• Standard vSwitch- or DVSwitch-based networking for your vSphere clusters - PMO currently does not integrate with VMware NSX software-defined networking platform. Support for this is upcoming. Contact [email protected] for more info!

• Outbound https network access - PMO Gateway OVA virtual appliance requires outbound https access to communicate with our cloud-based controller.

• If you are using a proxy, specify the proxy host address and port when deploying the gateway appliance.

• A VMware user account to authenticate with Platform9.

• PMO doesn’t require root user access to perform its operations. Following are the minimal access rights we require to perform all the operations:

VMware vSphere Privileges Required for PMO

All Privileges
Datastore
	Allocate space
	Browse datastore
	Low level file operation
	Remove file
Extension
	Regular Extension
Folder
	Create Folder
Host
	Configuration
		Maintenance
		Network configuration
		Storage partition configuration
Network
	Assign Network
Resource
	Assign virtual machine to resource pool
	Migrate powered off virtual machine
	Migrate powered on virtual machine
Virtual Machine
	Configuration
		Add existing disk
		Add new disk
		Add or remove device
		Advanced
		Change CPU count
		Change resource
		Change managedBy
		Disk change tracking
		Host USB device
		Memory
		Modify device settings
		Raw device
		Remove disk
		Rename
		Set annotation
		Settings
		Swapfile placement
	Interaction
		Configure CD media
		Power Off
		Power On
		Reset
		Suspend
	Inventory
		Create from existing
		Create new
		Move
		Remove
		Unregister
	Provisioning
		Clone virtual machine
		Customize
		Deploy template
		Mark as template
	Snapshot management
		Create snapshot
		Remove snapshot
Sessions
	Validate session
	View and stop sessions
vApp
	Export
	Import
dvPort group
	Create
	Delete
	Modify

Important: Most Restrictive Permissions

If the above permissions are given only on the appropriate datacenter (not the entire vCenter) then the user will need additional permissions on the vCenter root folder. The following permissions must be given to the user on the vCenter level. When creating this additional role, copy the pre-existing “Read-only” role and then add the following permissions. When assigning the permissions, “Propagate to Child Objects” should be selected. Failing to provide this will prevent us from getting information on status of tasks and sessions, registering new extensions, and from viewing storage profiles, which can lead to failure of tasks like VM provisioning and volume creation.

All Privileges
Extension
	Register extension
Profile-driven Storage
	Profile-driven Storage view
Sessions
	Validate session
	View and stop sessions
Storage Views
	View