Six months ago I wrote an article about Expanding vCloud Director Transfer Storage on a local block storage device. Today I take a step back and document the process of instantiating vCloud Director Transfer Storage on an NFS export which is where all scalable VCD implementations in production should reside. The process is not extremely difficult but it can be difficult to remember the fine details if Linux is not your native OS. Basically run through the following steps on each VCD cell server in the server group before installing vCloud Director. I’ll be performing these steps on a RHEL 5 Update 7 distribution.
First create the directory structure which the NFS export will be mounted to (the -p argument creates the entire path of directories as necessary):
mkdir -p /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer
Update 5/27/18: I happened to notice with RHEL 7.5 (could impact earlier builds as well) that mounting NFS exports now requires nfs-utils. Install this from the local DVD repository for YUM using the command yum install nfs-utils.
As a verification that NFS and networking is configured properly, use the showmount -e command to list mounts from the NFS server:
[root@vcdcell1 transfer]# showmount -e tsfiles.techsol.local
Export list for tsfiles.techsol.local:
/isos (everyone)
/oracle (everyone)
/unix (everyone)
/vcdtransfer (everyone)
/vcdtransfer2 (everyone)
[root@vcdcell1 transfer]#
Next, mount the NFS export manually:
mount nfshost.fqdn.orip:/nfs_export_name /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer
Finally, let’s make sure the NFS export auto mounts each time the cell is rebooted. This is done by editing /etc/fstab
nano -w /etc/fstab
Add the following line to /etc/fstab:
nfshost.fqdn.orip:/nfs_export_name /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer nfs rw 0 0
Exit nano using CTRL + X. Save /etc/fstab when prompted.
Proceed with the vCloud Director cell installation. If using the mount path in the example above, it is safe and convenient to press Enter through the default prompt relating to the Transfer Server Storage installation path.
I’ll close by pointing out that although the Transfer Server Storage is used as a temporary holding tank for vApp and catalog media imports and exports, critical cell data is also stored in this repository. If the Transfer Server Storage area is unavailable (ie. issues with NFS or the network), the VCD cell will not function properly, yielding a range of symptoms such as not being able to authenticate at the provider or organization portals.
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