Once the decisions have been made on workload planning, the work effort transitions to a Dell Technologies Professional Services engagement. The information captured from the requirements and use cases drives the overall sizing effort for the hardware platform. Once the order has been placed and awaiting delivery, Dell Technologies will commence with the planning and design phase. The solutions architect will walk through the deployment process using information gathered in the initial planning phase. It also captures the detailed design and configuration settings for the initial deployment of Cloud Foundation on VxRail.

The design and configuration settings that must be captured include specific details about how the Cloud Foundation on VxRail instance will integrate into the data center and network infrastructure. In addition, the settings for the VxRail clusters which will support the Cloud Foundation management and workload domains are captured, including the details for connecting the VxRail nodes into the data center network infrastructure. Then, the settings for the Cloud Foundation Cloud Builder virtual appliance, a tool that is used to drive the initial deployment of Cloud Foundation on VxRail, are captured.

If the deployment of a Cloud Foundation workload domain is part of the scope of work, the settings for the underlying VxRail cluster and initial workload domain properties are also captured. VI workload domains can be also deployed later as a separate Dell Professional Services engagement.

Upon completion of the capture of the required settings for initial deployment, the Dell Technologies solutions architect will perform a validation of the data center environment to ensure that all the prerequisites have been met.

Figure 8.        Overview of Cloud Builder automatic deployment of virtual appliances for a basic Cloud Foundation management workload domain

When the planning and design phase is complete, the next phases are:

• Deploying the VxRail cluster targeted to support the Cloud Foundation management workload domain
• Deploying the Cloud Foundation Cloud Builder virtual appliance on the VxRail cluster.

The configuration settings from the planning and design phase are captured in a workbook, which is then fed into the Cloud Builder virtual appliance. The Cloud Builder virtual appliance uses the configuration settings to automate the deployment of the Cloud Foundation software onto the VxRail cluster. This creates the Cloud Foundation management workload domain, and deploys the virtual machines required to support the management workload domain.