This post walks through planning, prerequisites, and the process of deploying a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) using HCX in Google Cloud VMware Engine …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. This post is the first in a series on Google Cloud VMware Engine and Google Cloud Platform. This post walks through planning, prerequisites, and the process of deploying a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) using HCX in Google Cloud VMware Engine, as well as configuring a VPN gateway for initial access to the environment. Before we dive into this, I want to set expectations for this blog series. My goal when working in the cloud is to create, modify and destroy resources programmatically. My tool of choice is Terraform, but I will also use CLI-based tools like gcloud. Occasionally I will inspect API calls directly and perform API calls with Python or cURL. I have found that learning a product’s API is an excellent way to master it. Cloud consoles (GUIs) are adequate when getting started, but interfacing with the API, whether through Terraform or an SDK, is how these platforms are designed to work. This first post will be different from the others because the Google Cloud VMware Engine API documentation is not yet public, nor is there any Terraform functionality available to create or destroy Google Cloud VMware Engine resources. API documentation and Terraform for Google Cloud VMware Engine is coming, so when it is available, I will certainly blog about it! For now, I will walk through the Google Cloud VMware Engine GUI to detail SDDC and VPN gateway creation. Have no fear — there will be plenty of Terraform in future posts. The most important thing to do before deploying anything into the cloud is rigorous planning. Deploying an SDDC in Google Cloud VMware Engine is no different. You will need to designate several unique IP ranges to be used for SDDC infrastructure and workloads, ensure the proper firewall ports are allowed to manage your SDDC and prepare your Google Cloud Platform environment before deploying an SDDC. All of these prerequisites are detailed in the Google Cloud VMware Engine prerequisites documentation, which I highly recommend reading. Google’s documentation is thorough, and there is nothing better than reading through all of the docs if you want to understand how this solution works.
