Cluster Blueprint

A Virtualized Cluster in Private Cloud Director is a group of hypervisor hosts that virtual machines get provisioned on.

You can create one or more virtualized clusters per region. You can also further slice a cluster into multiple subgroups of hosts using Host Aggregates. This allows you to combine hosts with similar characteristics into a cluster or a host aggregate within a cluster and target VM provisioning to that cluster or aggregate.

What is Cluster Blueprint

A cluster blueprint allow you to describe common configure that all virtualized clusters will share in a declarative, prescriptive manner. Blueprint is designed to help you express your desired cluster architecture upfront, and ensure that cluster capacity that is added over time conforms to this desired architecture.

Create a Cluster Blueprint

To deploy and use a virtualized cluster, your first step will be to create a cluster blueprint.

Navigate to Infrastructure -> Cluster Blueprints in the Private Cloud Director UI to create your cluster blueprint.

Follow the details in Networking Configuration to find out more about configuring networking service as part of the cluster blueprint configuration.

Follow the details in Block Storage Service Configuration to learn about creating one or more storage types as part of cluster blueprint.

Customize Cluster Defaults

Here you get to customize storage location for image library and virtual machine ephemeral storage.

Image Library Storage Location

Specify the storage type and location where virtual machine images will be stored.

You can specify a file system path or a volume type name for this option.

If you specify a volume type name for the image library location, that volume type will be used to store images in the image library. If you specify a filesystem path instead, you must indicate whether the path corresponds to local or shared storage. Enable the Shared Storage toggle if the path is configured to use NFS or an equivalent setup that is shared and mounted on all image library hosts.

Virtual Machine Storage Path

The virtual machine storage path specifies the disk location on each hypervisor that will be used to store:

• Ephemeral root disk files for VMs running on this hypervisor that are using ephemeral disks.

• Any additional VM metadata and files.

Read What Is Ephemeral Storage for an in-depth understanding of what is ephemeral storage and it's advantages and disadvantages before you configure this for your setup.

The default value for this path is /opt/data/instances. You can modify the default to a different location based on your preference.

This can be a local disk or an NFS shared disk, depending on how the storage path is configured at each hypervisor level.

Note that you configure this path once at the blueprint level for all hosts across all clusters in your hypervisor.

Virtual Machine Console IP

Specify an IP address or a domain name to be used to access the console of all VMs in the region. You can configure this in the blueprint. Ensure that proper routing or DNS resolution is in place so the console can be accessed reliably. Read more details here on how to set this up.

Update Cluster Blueprint

Some configurations in the cluster blueprint may be updated after hosts are added to the clusters, others are subject to limitations depending on how they are being applied to existing hosts. Cluster Network Parameters and Image Library and VM storage locations cannot be edited once hosts are authorized to the PCD region.

You can still make changes to cluster blueprint to add a network interface to an existing in-use Host Configuration or update the key-value metadata for Volume Backend Configurations. These configuration changes do get propagated to existing hosts that are already part of a cluster. When adding a new network interface to an in-use Host Configuration, you would not be able to change the system traffic options to use this new interface, but you could create a new Physical Network using the Physical Network Label associated with this interface.