Offline Deployment Overview
Cisco Smart PHY supports deployment in an offline operator-managed vSphere virtualization environment.
You can download the Smart PHY software package as a compressed file from the Cisco.com website. The software package contains instructions, sample cluster configuration files, a cluster deployment tool, and the Smart PHY software.
Deployment Components
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Deploy tool—A deployment automation tool that controls the deployment of an Smart PHY cluster.
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Staging Environment—A desktop operating system or virtual machine that meets the requirements to run the deploy tool.
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Cluster Configuration file—An YAML-formatted text file that contains the Smart PHY cluster configuration, including the vSphere configuration, and “Deployer” VM configuration. An 'admin' user creates the configuration file.
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Deployer VM—The deploy tool instantiates the Deployer VM. This virtual machine hosts the software, container image, and VM image repositories needed to complete an offline Smart PHY cluster deployment.
Deployment Overview
At a high level, deploying the Cisco Smart PHY cluster consists of the following steps:
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(Optional) Configuring UCS Servers for Hosting Smart PHY. This step is only required when deploying on to Cisco UCS servers dedicated to the cluster.
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Preparing the Staging Environment
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Creating the cluster Configuration File
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Executing the deploy tool. For more information, see Deploying the Deployer VM and Cisco Smart PHY Cluster. To deploy another cluster, repeat creating the configuration file and deploying the cluster procedures.
The deploy tool, which is run from your staging environment, reads the Smart PHY cluster configuration from the specified cluster configuration file. After validating the values from the cluster configuration file, the deploy tool instantiates a “Deployer” VM in your designated vSphere environment.
Once the “Deployer” VM boots completely, the deploy tool syncs the Smart PHY cluster configuration to a software agent running on the “Deployer” VM. The agent executes the following Smart PHY cluster operations:
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Copying cluster VM images to the vSphere datastore
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Instantiating cluster VM
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Configuring Guest OS
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Installing and configuring container orchestrations software
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Finally, launching Smart PHY’s containerized micro-services
Deployment Types
The deploy tool can create two types of Cisco Smart PHY clusters:
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All-in-one (AIO) cluster—Runs as a single VM on an ESXi host.
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AIO clusters are best suited for labs and small production environments where high availability is not required.
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Multinode cluster—Consists of 12 VMs deployed across three ESXi hosts.
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Each ESXi host runs one instance of these four VMs: control-plane, etcd, Infra, and Operations.
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Multinode clusters provide high availability and continues to operate even after a failure of one ESXi host.
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Two multimode cluster sizes are available:
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Small—Best suited for labs and small production environment. This is the default deployment size when no value is specified in the cluster configuration file.
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Normal—Best suited for large production environment.
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