This post is part of the “Mesosphere DC/OS, Azure, Docker, VMware & Everything Between” multiple blog post series. In the previous posta for this series, I looked at the following topics:

Mesosphere DCOS, Azure, Docker, VMware and everything between – Architecture and CI/CD Flow

Mesosphere DCOS, Azure, Docker, VMware and everything between – Security & Docker Engine Installation

Mesosphere DCOS, Azure, Docker, VMware & Everything Between – SSH Authorized Keys

Now that we have the Docker engine up and running and all of our network & security related configurations in place, it’s time to get the DC/OS cluster rolling on top of VMware vSphere. This is the first major milestone in our entire platform setup. Let’s get moving…

Since this is not a “DC/OS Deep Dive” series, I will not go into much details on DCOS components, but I will provide relevant info on why things the way they are.

Before diving into the installation steps, I highly recommend going over to DCOS Node Types and Network KBs.

For our vSphere DCOS cluster deployment, I will not deploy public agent nodes. To understand why, we need to go back and review the CI/CD flow.

As you remember, in our flow, the “production containers” stops at the DCOS cluster deployed on vSphere. The reason for not deploying public nodes (think of them as your DMZ deployed hosts) is customer requirement to have the production containers available only from corporate LAN or via VPN. Later on, the plan is to provide internet access via the corporate load balancer but to keep things nice and simple, we will deploy only the private agents.

The agent nodes are responsible for hosting your Docker containers and for this deployment, we will have 3 of those.

Read more about all the details around DC/OS 1.9 deployment on top of VMware vSphere on my blog.