Platform9 Managed OpenStack Pre-requisites for VMware vSphere

Following are the prerequisites for deploying your Platform9 Managed OpenStack with VMware vSphere:

• A single VMware vCenter environment – Platform9 requires a vCenter Management server to communicate with your vSphere environment.
• One or more VMware vSphere Clusters with DRS enabled, fully automated, located in the vCenter environment – Platform9 treats your vCenter clusters as resources. Support for standalone ESXi hosts is part of roadmap. NOTE: DRS enabled clusters is a requirement for OpenStack. If you need to use Platform9 OpenStack without DRS enablement, you will need to ensure that your clusters have only 1 host in them
• One or more VMware vSphere datastores that the clusters have access to – The clusters chosen to work with Platform9 should have access to these datastores.
• One or more VMware vSphere templates to act as images for your Glance image catalog – Platform9 Managed OpenStack offers built-in support for templates. All you need to do is copy over the templates you’d like to make part of Platform9’s image catalog onto the datastore(s) you are giving Platform9 access to. We will discovery any templates we find on these datastores and report them to be part of your image catalog.
• Standard vSwitch- or DVSwitch-based networking for your vSphere clusters – Platform9 currently does not integrate with VMware NSX software-defined networking platform. Support for this is upcoming. Contact support@platform9.com for more info!
• Outbound https network access – Platform9 Gateway OVA virtual appliance requires outbound https access to communicate with our cloud-based controller.
  • If you are using a proxy, specify the proxy host address and port when deploying the gateway appliance.
• A VMware user account to authenticate with Platform9.
  • Platform9 doesn’t require root user access to perform its operation. Following are the minimal access rights we require to perform all the operations:

VMware vSphere Privileges Required for Platform9 Managed OpenStack

Important: Most Restrictive Permissions

If the above permissions are given only on the appropriate datacenter (not the entire vCenter) then the user will need additional permissions on the vCenter root folder. The following permissions must be given to the user on the vCenter level. When creating this additional role, copy the pre-existing “Read-only” role and then add the following permissions. When assigning the permissions, “Propagate to Child Objects” should be selected. Failing to provide this will prevent us from getting information on status of tasks and sessions, and from viewing storage profiles, which can lead to failure of tasks like VM provisioning and Volume creation.