One of our partners was playing around with vCloud Director and noticed that they could create a Provider vDC and link it directly to an ESX Host. vCloud Director did not complain about it so they figured it would be okay. However it is a requirement for vCloud Director to have DRS. One of the reasons for this being is the fact that vCloud Director leverages resource pools to ensure tenants receive what they are entitled to.
But back to the issue, they created the Provider vDC and went on to create an Org vDC and even that worked fine… Next stop was the “Organization Network. In order to create one you will need to select a network pool at some point and for some weird reason that didn’t work. After some initial emailing back and forth I noticed they didn’t select a cluster or resource pool but an ESX host. After creating a new Provider vDC based on a vSphere Resource Pool all of a sudden everything started working. Although I cannot really say why it is exactly this part that causes an issue, I can tell you that DRS is a hard requirement and not just a suggestion!
I had exactly this problem last week and discovered the same fix.. weird, esp as the pool and backing networks were available to the host
Great info, Duncan—thanks for bringing it to the community’s attention! It seems like it might be beneficial for VMware to update vCloud Director so that it would not be possible to bind the Provider vDC directly to a host. That would prevent this sort of issue.
I am facing a somewhat similar issue. I can create provider vDC and external network, however, in provider vDC i cannot see any external network and vice-versa. If DRS is a must requirement, does it mean i cannot have a single ESX vDC setup?
You “could” create a cluster, enable DRS, create a resource pool, and only have a single host in the cluster… Although everything I’ve read is pretty clear on a two-host minimum configuration. Honestly, I haven’t deployed it with only one host so I can’t speak from experience.