VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is quickly becoming the go-to for many companies. The operations efficiency it brings, along with its best practices driven architecture is a no-brainer when it comes to value. As with any purchases, many people like to kick the tires on a new product, or just want to get familiar with it via Proof of Concepts, virtual labs, home labs, etc. Testing VCF is a great way to learn it, but because it uses best practices (VMware Validated Designs), some decisions are made for you, one of them is the NSX Cluster.

To make matters simple, I will refer to VCF 4.0+, where NSX-T is used for Management and VI Workload Domains… no more NSX-V. To deploy VCF we use a worksheet we can download from my.vmware.com 

This worksheet will deploy 3 NSX-T Managers and create a cluster under a Virtual IP (VIP). The NSX-T Managers are “t-shirt” sizes, by default deploying Medium NSX-T Appliances, but they can be changed to either Large or Small on the worksheet.

 

As you can see from the worksheet, it requires 3 NSX-T Managers to be deployed. So here is where we can use other avenues to reduce that resource consumption.

TIP 1:

If you wish to deploy all 3 NSX-T Managers, you can change the size to small on the worksheet in order to reduce the resource footprint, prior to VCF bring-up.

 

TIP 2:

This second option allows for setting the size to small and at the same time allows to also create a single node cluster. This can be done by using a json file during VCF bring-up rather than using the worksheet. Within the json file, remove any additional entries of NSX-T Managers and leave only one node.

For additional information on how to obtain the json file, you can find the procedure here.

 

TIP 3:

Another option relates to a post bring-up procedure. In the case that VCF has already been stood up, and resources want to be minimized within the lab, the option to remove nodes from the NSX Cluster would be a viable solution. Removing nodes from the NSX cluster can be done from CLI within the NSX cluster.

It is necessary to SSH into one of the cluster nodes in order to remove nodes from the NSX cluster. If unable to SSH, verify that the AllowRootAccess is enabled and StrictMode is set to no. Then restart the ssh service with the following command:

/etc/init.d/ssh restart

Then ssh into that node using the admin account. Once logged in, there are a list of command available, including get and detach.

 

Use the GET command to get the ID of the cluster nodes.

get cluster status

 

Use the ID along with the detach cmd to remove a specific node. Repeat the process to remove the the second node until there is only one left.

detach node <node-id>

 

I want to reiterate that this is a good resource saving workaround on a LAB environment. For production environments, please follow the already applied recommendations/best practices for deploying VCF.