Hello, today I'll walk through deploying Cisco's Intersight private Virtual appliance on Nutanix AHB, focusing on the preparation and decisions that matter in a disconnected air gapped environment.00:06I'll then show a short demo on the topics covered. Here's the path we'll follow. 1st, we'll confirm the AHB platform's readiness and go over the prerequisites. Then we'll discuss the important DNS settings, deploying and initializing the PBA image, and we'll finish up the slides with license reservations and steps to validate the PPA deployment before.00:18We're getting into the demo. Before we're deploying the PVA, confirm that the AHB release and available resources meet Cisco's current deployment guidance. You download the PVA software bundle from Cisco and stage in the air gapped environment.00:38Reserve the management address and identify the gateway DNS servers with proper DNS reservations and the NTP source. Finally confirm that you can access the right smart account to reserve the license for the private virtual appliance. These are the items most likely to delay setup if they are left until deployment day.00:55DNS is a specific prerequisite for the inter site appliance. There are multiple DNS entries needed to successfully deploy the appliance. You will need to create an A record for the management host name and point it to the preserved management IP. Create the matching pointer record so a reverse lookup of that same address returns the management host.01:16His name.01:35The 3rd entry is a C name for the DC-prefix alias pointing back to the management host name. Examples of these entries are shown here. Before you start the appliance setup, check that all three records resolve as expected from the local DNS environment that the PVA will use.01:36Once the prerequisites are ready and DNS is in place, the deployment moves to AHB. If not already done, bring the PVA software bundle into the environment and untar it. Upload the qcal two image files to the Nutanix image service.02:00Then create the PVA virtual machine using the current Cisco sizing guidance for your release. Be sure to attach the individual Qcal two files to the VM in the correct order as indicated by the file names. Attach the VM virtual nic, to the intended local management network and power on the new virtual machine.02:16With the VM created and now powered on, open its console and start the installer. Enter the management address, net mask, gateway, local DNS servers, NTP server, and the admin password for this appliance.02:40When you set the appliance name, use the fully qualified hostname represented by the DNS records we just reviewed. After this, the VM will begin starting services. Navigate to the FQDN of the VM in your browser. Keep in mind that it may take a few minutes for the interface to be available as the VM is starting up services.02:53Once it's ready, the page will refresh. After the page refreshes, select to install the PVA software bundle, give the admin password, and give the initial services time start. Follow the prompts and sequence in the guide for the exact software release you're installing.03:12Licensing is handled through a disconnected reservation exchange from the PVA licensing page generate a reservation request code in Cisco smart licensing with this code using the appropriate smart account and virtual account.03:32Select the PVA tier and quantity required for the deployment, provide the request code and that will produce a reservation authorization code which you take back to the PVA and enter there. After the code is applied, verify the reserved tier.03:47And last updated status. Keep in mind that changes later may require another code exchange, so use the PVA reservation workflow again for updates or returns. This is a manual exchange designed for the disconnected environment PVA.04:03After deployment, you can validate the deployment to wrap it up. 1st, open Nutanix Prism and confirm that the PVA virtual machine is powered on and reports healthy. Then open the intersite GUI to confirm it loads and reports NO issues.04:24Now let's move on into the demo. Before we jump into the deployment, let's take a look at some of the prerequisites that we need to have before getting started. 1st from software.cisco.com, you'll want to download the inter site bundle for.04:42ABM. This is the bundle that we use to do the deployment on Nutanix AHV. Once you deploy that, it will provide you with a tar file that's gonna have multiple disk files in it. You can untard that.05:00And you'll get the eight individual qcal two files that will need to be uploaded to Nutanix AHV. Also, these are the requirements for the different sizes of the VM depending on which deployment you're going to do.05:16Small, medium or large, will require 08:24 or 48 vcpus, respectively, 3264 or 96 gigs of RAM, 600 gigs of storage for the small.05:36For 2 tb of storage each for the medium and large VM. For Nutanix A HV hypervisor, the AOs versions currently supported and maintained by Nutanix are the versions that we support for the deployment of the private virtual appliance.05:51The other prerequisite that we need to check is our DNS entries. On your DNS server, again, you're going to need an A record, a pointer record for reverse lookup and a C name record. So let's take a look at our DNS entries and then we'll take test them and make sure that they resolve.06:08So if we take a look at our A name and our C name record, you'll see that we have an A record for cX-DCC-prod p-PVA.06:28Going to this IP address, and we have a C name for DC-CX-DCC-prod-PVA pointed to CX-DCC-prod-PVA.DCB pod.06:46We'll also go ahead and check our reverse lookup now.07:10And you'll see that we do have a reverse lookup for 198.19.220.239 that points to the CX-DCC-prod-PVA.DCV dot.07:27Okay, so we have our three DNS entries. Now let's run a few tests just to make sure that everything resolves the way that we need them to. So we can run an NS lookup on the A record.07:45Okay. And that does resolve. We can run a NS lookup type.08:01See name for BTC dash.08:18And that does resolve to the canonical name and we can do a reverse look up as well on the IP address.08:33Okay that should give us our reverse lookup. So everything is resolving the way that we would expect it to. Okay, so we're now here in prism element. The 1st thing you'll need to do is upload the image file.08:48So we downloaded an untard to Prisma element. We could do that.09:08Under settings and image configuration. Now I already have the inter site images uploaded to PRISM elements, but to do so, what you'll need to do is click this upload image.09:13And then give you the image a name. Select the image type. In this case, it's going to be a disk, and then the storage container that you want to store those images at.09:29And then if you have them on a local share in your network, you can upload from from your URL or if you are uploading them from your workstation, you can just upload a file and click choose file. Once you have that file, you can click save. Now, you will need to do that.09:48Eight times for each of these images and make sure when you name them that you name them something that it's easy to tell which disk they are because they do need to be attached to the VM in order. So once your appliance.10:07Disks are uploaded, you can then go to the VM section of prism element and get the VM ready to deploy. So once you're here, you can click on, create a VM.10:23And you're gonna wanna give it a name and select your time zone.10:43And compute details, so this is where you're gonna define how many vcpus and how much memory the server's gonna have. But remember we mentioned different sizes of the VM will require different amounts of memory and CPU.10:59Now the small requirements, so the small VM deployment is really just for inter site assist. So for PVA, we're gonna wanna go either medium or large. We're gonna do a medium deployment, so that's gonna require.11:2024 vcpus and 64 gigs of memory. We'll leave the UEFI setting, and here we're going to attach our disks. So we will click add a new disk, and we need to do this in order.11:37So it's gonna be a disk. We're going to clone it from an image service. It's gonna be a scsi, and so we'll select disk one and set the index to next available.11:56Add, then we will do that again, now the disk, image service, image will be disk two, add, and then we'll keep on going.12:13Almost there.13:14Yeah, ok, so we have our eight disks that have been.13:37Attached in order. So now we need to attach our network adapter to the correct network. This is correct for this particular environment. We want it to be connected.13:44Add and once we have done that, we can go ahead now and click save. Okay, so now that it's saved, we should see this new VM pop up in our list of virtual machines and.14:00In Prism element, so we can now click on that and we can scroll down and get a little bit more information on this VM. Right now obviously it's powered off, so it's not really doing anything. So now let's go ahead and power on this VM.14:17Okay, now let's launch the console. So from here, we will need to go ahead and do a little bit of configuration for the appliance itself. So we're gonna go ahead and set our admin password.14:33And we'll have to re enter that.14:58Okay, and we're gonna do a static IP, and we'll need to tell it if we're gonna do IPV four or IPv six or both. We're just gonna do IPv four.15:12And now I need to provide the IP address. So we'll go ahead and give it our IP address.15:32And give it our net mask, and our default gateway.15:52Okay, now we're gonna need to get it our DNS server, and this is gonna be the DNS server that we set up all of those DNS entries on.16:09And our domain. So what does our appliance FQDN gonna be? I'm gonna provide that.16:29And our NTP.16:57So it will then apply these settings and it will then start to do the appliance install. This process does take some time, so I am going to pause the recording and we'll pick the recording back up once this part is complete.17:21Okay, once the PVA has completed that process of the deployment, it should come to this screen on the console, notice it is not yet installed. It is ready to be installed at this point. So from here we can go to this web URL.17:42HTTPS and the FQDN that you gave the PVA, so let's do that now.17:58Okay, and that will bring you to the installer GUI. So now you're gonna see a few options here. You can install the connected virtual appliance, install the private virtual appliance, install assist or recover from backup or if you are doing multi node, you can add a node to an appliance. We are going to click install the private.18:24Private virtual appliance and click start right it is going to run several checks here. It's gonna check for DNS, so we can go ahead and click next because everything passed, and.18:44Then it's gonna do the configure internal network. So by default it's gonna choose this internal network IP of 1721748 zero/twenty. If you need to change this for any reason, this is all for internal communications within the interstate virtual appliance, but this overlaps with any IP.19:01Subnetting that you are using in your data center, you can change this. It just needs to be within this 172160 zero/twelve subnet. We're gonna go ahead and take the default here. Now it wants to.19:20Update the software to the latest package. You can either upload from a local machine or if you have the latest package on a network share, you can do that. To get this latest software update, you can click on this downloading software packages for interstate virtual appliance.19:37And that will walk you through the process here. You'll need to go to intersight, and configure your Cisco ID, and then from there you should be brought to the software download page. If you don't have a Cisco ID, you can click this link to go ahead and.19:56Create one.20:16Once you do create your account and log in, it will bring you to the software downloads page directly. From here you will see all of the different types of firmware and software that you can download for your inter site PVA. We can click on the appliance software to kind of filter this down to just.20:20Things that are relevant to Intersight appliance, and this Intersight appliance bundle is what we're gonna wanna grab.20:39So we can click on that and then click download. That will start the download process to your local workstation. Once you've downloaded the latest bundle, you have it available either on your workstation or on a network share. You are ready to go ahead and point it.20:46The installer to that file, you can either upload from local machine or if you have it on a share, you can put it that information here.21:04After you hit enter, it's going to start uploading the software. This bit will take.21:30Quite a while. So I will go ahead and pause the recording here and then we will pick it back up when it is closer to being done. You'll see that you could look at the download logs here and also aspect progresses, you will see different steps that it is.21:36Taking fill in the space here so these lines will move down, the new lines showing what it is doing at that point in time will show up. So it's been several minutes now and you can see all of the different steps here that we've progressed through.21:56Up to this point. Still doing the install, still in progress. Once this completes, it will automatically move to the next screen. I'm gonna go ahead and again pause the recording and come back once we get to that point. Okay, so the deployment has finished and the page refreshed and we are.22:14We're now here at the login page. We're gonna give the admin credentials that we created when we were deploying the.22:34System and here we have to do our license reservations, so this is a mandatory step that we have to perform before we can actually use the PVA itself. You're gonna get this.22:42Licensing code here. So you can either copy that to your clipboard or if you are on a system that does not have internet access, you can download this, transfer it over to a workstation that does have access to cisco.com and then complete this process from there.23:01We will go ahead and copy the clipboard, and then we will go to smart licensing choose your smart licensing account and the correct virtual account. Under licenses, you'll see this license reservation option. So we'll click that and then we'll click proceed. And here we are going to pay.23:18List that reservation code and then click next. It's going to pull the license type. We're gonna go ahead and click to reserve a specific license. We want to reserve our inter site PVA license.23:38We're going to go ahead and reserve three licenses. You'll need to reserve a license for every UCS server that you want to claim in that inter site. So we select three for that and then we will go ahead and click next.23:56Oh, we're gonna just review that and confirm that this is the license that we are activating and this is the expiration date, and we will generate authorization code.24:12This will spit out this code. We can copy that back to clipboard. Again, if you did have to do this on a separate workstation that does have internet access, you can download that as a file, transfer it back to, where you can access that PVA and proceed from there.24:27We will come back here and then further down on the screen, we can haste that code there and click install. This will take a few minutes to verify the authorization code.24:44Once it is complete, we will be able to proceed. Okay, so the authorization code was installed successfully, we can go ahead and click finish now.25:00And we are now inside of our private virtual appliance. You can use the meet Cisco Intersight tour if you like or you can click skip and go ahead and get started claiming your devices. So that is how to deploy your inter site private virtual appliance.25:17In your Nutanix AHV environment.25:38
