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SmartFabric Services with Multisite vSAN Stretched Cluster Deployment Guide
Notes, cautions, and warnings Introduction Hardware Used in this Guide Topology Deployment Planning SFS switch configuration Configure DCI switches Configure Fabric Interconnects Configure Networks Add ESXi hosts to topology Configure a jump host Deploy the DNS server and the vCenter Server
Deploy VM for DNS/NTP server
Deploy the vCenter Server
ESXi services and witness host configuration Deploy the vSAN Stretched Cluster Migrate the vCenter Server and the DNS server Add User VMs Deploy OMNI Validated Components Technical Resources CLI Command Output

Deploy VM for DNS/NTP server

Home > Networking Solutions > Converged and Hyperconverged Solutions > vSAN Networking Solutions > Guides > SmartFabric Services with Multisite vSAN Stretched Cluster Deployment Guide > Deploy VM for DNS/NTP server

Deploy VM for DNS/NTP server

  • Before deploying the vCenter server, a DNS server must be available on the network. Dell Technologies recommends the use of an NTP server as all hosts and vCenter need to have their times synchronized for VMware Skyline Health checks to pass. In this section, a VM used as the DNS/NTP server is deployed.

    1.  From the jump host, connect to the ESXi services host UI in a browser, https://192.168.11.5 in this example, and log in as root. 
    2.  Select Virtual Machines > Create/Register VM. 
    3.  Choose one of the methods provided to deploy the virtual machine. 
      Note: Steps to deploy the virtual machine depend on the method used and are outside the scope of this guide. See your VMware vSphere documentation for more information.

      The VM in this example is named win-dns, as shown. In the vSwitch, ensure the port group the VM is connected to is in the management VLAN, VLAN 11 in this example. Also ensure the physical adapters match those connected to the leaf switches, vmnic2 and vmnic3 in this example.

      Figure 56. vSwitch topology for DNS/NTP VM on services host
    4.  Log in to the VM’s operating system and configure the IP address, subnet mask, and gateway. 
      Note: This example uses 192.168.11.1, 255.255.255.0, and 192.168.11.254 respectively.

    5.  Verify that the VM can ping ESXi hosts in all sites by their IP addresses. 

    Configure the DNS server

    Create the forward and reverse lookup records as needed on the DNS server. The records used in this deployment example are listed in Table 1 in the planning section of this guide.

    Note: DNS server configuration depends on the software used and is outside the scope of this guide.

    A Microsoft Windows DNS server is used in this example, and when configured with forward and reverse lookup zones, it looks like the following:

    Figure 57. DNS server configured

    You can verify the DNS server and ESXi hosts are configured properly by pinging other hosts by name.

    Figure 58. Host esx01 pings esx07 by name

    Configure NTP server

    An NTP server is recommended as all hosts and vCenter need to have their times synchronized for VMware Skyline Health checks to pass. For the deployment in this guide, an NTP server is configured on the same VM that hosts the DNS server.

    Note: NTP server configuration depends on the software used and is outside the scope of this guide.