Recently, we decided to test vRO 7.3 in clustered mode. In previous versions we have not had a great experience with vRO clusters and as a result have always had single vROs in Master and Slave setup. With the latest version seemingly giving more stability we have created a POC and Load Balanced as much as possible. I noticed a lack of blog posts about setting this up and decided to add one here.

At this stage I am assuming some pre-requisites met and design decisions have been made:

• Load Balancers and DNS names have been setup for vRA and vRO
• vRA has been configured and will be used as vRO authentication mode
• SQL will be used as the Database for the cluster
• vRO appliances have been deployed and powered on

Set Up Initial vRO Instance

Logon to the fist of our 2 vRO appliances using the control center URL – https://hostnameoffvro001.domain.local:8283/vco-controlcenter

Select the deployment type of “Standalone Orchestrator” and enter the FQDN of the load balancer and click Next

Click on Authentication Provider and select vRealize Automation as the authentication mode. Enter the FQDN of the vRA appliance load balancer as the Host Address. Click Save Changes and accept the certificate.

You will then be prompted to input the default tenant and admin group. Enter the relevant details. Click Save Changes.

Click on the Test Login tab and enter the credentials of a member of the admin group. Confirm that vRO accepts these credentials and acknowledges that they do indeed have administrator rights.

Back on the home page of the Control Center, click on Validate Configuration

It is expected that the Configuration Applied and Cluster sections will have a red cross. This is because a reboot is required. Everything else should have a green tick.

Browse to Start Up Options from the control center homepage, and restart the Orchestrator Service. it will take approx. 2 minutes for the appliance to restart.

Once you have logged back on to the control center after restart, you should now see full page of green ticks under the Validate Configuration tab.

Sign out of vRO

Prepare SQL Database

Logon to your SQL Server, open and login to SQL Server Management Studio

Execute a new SQL Query to create the vRO Database

Verify that the Query was executed successfully

Create an account and assign default DB as the newly created one.

Close SQL Management Studio and Logoff from the SQL Server.

Configure vRO Database

Log back onto the vRO Control Center Page and browse to Configure Database

Select SQL Server as Database Type

Enter the FQDN of the SQL server as Server Address and enter 1433 as the port

Enter the Database Name that we have just created in the Database Name field

Enter the credentials of the new account we have just crearted under the Username and Password fields

Click Save and confirm that the configuration is successfully saved.

Configure 2nd vRO and Create Cluster

Login to the 2nd vRO instance and this time chose Clustered Orchestrator for Deployment type. Enter the FQDN of the the 1st vRO machine you created and enter port 8283. Type in the root credentials for the 1st host.

Click Join

Click on Orchestrator Cluster Management

Verify that the 2nd Instance exists as part of the cluster and that both entities are synchronized

So there you have it, a quick guide to configuring a vRO 7.3 cluster using SQL and vRA for authentication mode.