4.6 VMware Platform Services Controller
vSphere Replication Cloud Service relies on the Platform Services Controller infrastructure to discover other services and for vCloud Director authentication. The following requirements must be met:
• All resource vCenter Server instances must be registered in a single Platform Services Controller vSphere domain (for example, vsphere.local).
• All Cassandra nodes must be registered in the Platform Services Controller lookup service.
• The vSphere Replication Manager Server must be registered in the Platform Services Controller lookup service.
• vCloud Director must be federated with the Platform Services Controller.
• The Platform Services Controller solution user for each vSphere Replication Cloud Service node is added to vCloud Director system administrator users.
As soon as more than one resource vCenter Server is deployed, you must have an external Platform Services Controller because you cannot have multiple embedded Platform Services Controller instances in a single Platform Services Controller domain (
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2108548).
An existing resource vCenter Server with an embedded Platform Services Controller can be repointed to an external Platform Services Controller if needed. To do this, use the instructions documented at
http://vmw.re/emb2ext.
High availability for Platform Services Controller instances can be achieved with VMware vSphere High Availability or by deploying a load balancer in front of two nodes. For more information, see
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2113315.
The Platform Services Controller (vSphere 6.0) has the following scalability constraints:
• 8 Platform Services Controller nodes per domain
• 4 vCenter Server nodes per single Platform Services Controller node
• 4 Platform Services Controller nodes per Platform Services Controller site
• 10 vCenter Server nodes per Platform Services Controller domain
To fulfill these requirements and constraints while keeping the complexity of the solution low, you can use the Platform Services Controller design options described in the following sections.