The first things to deploy for HCX are the HCX Connector appliance (source) and HCX Cloud appliance (Target).
These are typically deployed as close to, or in the same VLAN as the vCenter to which they will connect.
For deployment sake, your laptop or Jumpbox should have full access to the HCX network(s) to be able to provision and then connect to the new appliances.
Now download the last OVA files from the Broadcom downloads website, the latest editions are around 5GB each.
The next task is to download and install the latest versions of PowerShell and PowerCLI, as of the time of writing these were PowerShell 7.4.2 and PowerCLI 13.2.1.
Note – It is important to get the latest PowerCLI as the libraries as they are updated to support the latest HCX features.
Note – Make sure you run PowerShell as ‘Administrator’ otherwise various things may not work.
IMPORTANT: Speak to your friendly Network Admin and ask them to create Forward AND Reverse DNS entries for the HCX Appliances.
Input File
Create a CSV input file with all the details needed to deploy the OVAs, my example below just has two input columns, one for the source (column B) and one for the target (column C) deployments:
The IPs etc used are all in an air gapped network so I’m happy to give them and the passwords in the example.
Note – If you don’t want to pass passwords from a CSV, I have some code to take in the credentials and save them in secure credential files for re-use. I have covered this in another blog, check out Little Nuggets.
PowerCLI Deployment Script
The first thing you want to do is check which OVA you will deploy, this will then read the relevant column and inputs from the CSV:
- If user types ‘source’, the SiteID is set to 0 and the values will be read from column B in the CSV
- If user types ‘target’, the SiteID is set to 1 and the values will be read from column C in the CSV
Next is to check the CSV file actually exists and then read the relevant contents.
For this example I create a ‘hashtable’ of the CSV for easy reference.
Now you have a hashtable and a SiteID (0 or 1), you can then read the required inputs for the deployment.
The next step it to connect to the vCenter defined in the input file, in this example it would be ‘ash-vc-01.ash.lab’.
Based on the SiteID, the relevant inputs into variables for the final commands.
Now you have all the input data, you can populate the OVA input variables with a similar list to below:
At this point you are just about read to go…….
You can now run the ‘Import-VApp‘ command to deploy HCX:
This may take a few minutes based on your environment, it is good to add a loop process to check if the Web and App services have come online after power on:
GO TIME
OK, we now have an input file and a script.
Lets run it and see what happens:
- Prompts for source or target
- Checks the Input CSV file
- Creates the Hashtable
Now it picks the relevant column of data and loads the variables into the command:
Within vCenter you can see the OVA deployment, then the vApp being powered on:
Changing back to PowerShell, you can see the loop happening, checking for the VM state.
Go get your self a quick drink and come back for the finale.
You should be able to logon to the Admin UI / VAMI with the local credentials provided in the CSV file ‘https://<HCX FQDN>:9443‘.
Now, run it again for the ‘target’ HCX Manager.
That wraps up the OVA deployment, next steps will be configuring the HCX appliance management settings via API and PowerCLI.
Ready to move on? Click here for blog 4 of 9 – Base HCX Manager Configuration
Want to see the process in action?
Click the movie below (maybe watch it at 2x speed):