vCAC 5.2 series – Requirements

vCloud  Automation Center 5.2 will help you manage and automate deploy physical and virtual workloads as well as manage virual/physical workloads life cycle.  It does support several different hypervisors and management software:

• VMware vSphere ESX 3.5 or newer
• VMware vCenter server 4.0 U4 or newer
• VMware vCloud director 5.1.X
• KVM – RHEV 3.1
• Citrix XEN server 5.2 SP2 or 6.0.2
• Hyper-V 2008 R2 and 2012
• Microsoft SCCVM 2012
• kickstart
• CISCO UCS manager
• HP iLO
• DELL DRAC

For full list of supported systems see vCAC 5.2 support matrix.

[box type=”info”] vCloud Automation Center 5.2 support matrix

vCloud Automation Center 5.2 features[/box]

Using vCO – vCenter orchestrator and Powershell as a “automation and communication layer” with other system gives possibility to extend vCloud Automation Center functionality for many more systems such as:

• Infoblox
• Citrix desktop delivery controller
• and others

vCloud Automation Center 5.2

Hardware Requirements

For POC below  hardware specs are more than enough

• 2 CPU
• 3 GB RAM
• 40GB disk

For production implementations consider to read vCAC Reference architecture – Link on the bottom of the post.

Software Requirements

• Valid vCAC 5.2 license
• OS platform – Windows 2008 R2 SP1
• Authorization – Active directory or MSSQL server
• IIS 7.5 server requirements:
  • Internet Information Services (IIS) modules:
    • WindowsAuthentication
    • StaticContent
    • DefaultDocument
    • ASPNET
    • ISAPIExtensions
    • ISAPIFilter
  •  IIS server configuration
    • IIS Authentication:
    • Windows Authentication enabled
    • AnonymousAuthentication disabled
    • Negotiate Provider enabled
    • NTLM Provider enabled
    • Windows Authentication Kernel Mode enabled
    • Windows Authentication Extended Protection disable
    • ConfigurationApi
    • NetEnvironment
    • ProcessModel
    • WcfActivation
    • HttpActivation
    • NonHttpActivation
• DB server – MSSQL 2008 R2 or newer
  • Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator Service (MS DTC) enabled on all SQL nodes in the system
  • TCPIP enabled
• vCAC server requirements:
  • Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator Service (MS DTC) enabled
• .Net 4.5 or newer on all servers
• vCAC prereq checker on all servers
• Windows PowerShell version 2.0 on all servers
• SecondaryLogOnService running
• Communication ports

vCAC firewall ports requirements

Mandatory document to read before vCloud Automation Center deployment isvCAC 5.2 reference architecture. Document helps to make  several design decision such as high availability consideration, load balancing considerations and hardware requirements

[box type=”info”] vCAC 5.2 Reference architecture[/box]