ClusterFunk

I recently built out a CMS hosting environment for a UK Airport web site. Whilst doing this I came across some issues deploying ZTM and ZLB appliance which is easy to resolve if you know how.

VM Nic Bindings

OR..  Binding VM Nic 1 to eth1 and VM Nic 2 to eth0

Let’s say for arguments sake that the networks are configured as follows 

ZTM 1 has following desired config.

The Network adapter 1 is in .76 (VLAN 301 10.0.74.64/27)
The Network adapter 2 is in .108 (VLAN 302 10.0.74.96/27)

Notice that eth1 is bound to VM Network adapter 1 and eth0 to VM Network adapter 2. Compare the MAC addresses above with the mappings below.

This is a problem because the ZTM has the wrong IP config for each NIC.

We could go into the appliance OS and change the nic config as already highlight below the VM ZTM / ZLB Appliance config is managed by the ZTM/ZLB install and you will see messages like below in the config files.

I found this out the hard way when I added hosts to the hosts file, only to see them disappear and my application stopped running. Now I know this is done on the appliance via the GUI (System>Network>DNS).

FIX 1

You can try running z-set-inital-address as below.

Open the Zeus Virtual Appliance‘s console interface (via VMware management interface)

Press Alt+F2 to switch to tty2.

Logging in as admin with the default password of admin.

Running the z-set-initial-address command.

This will prompt you for an IP address and netmask. Once the command terminates, enter the logout command, and switch back to tty1 by pressing Alt+F1. You should notice that the IP address in the URL for the admin server has changed

This did not work for me.

FIX 2

This is more of a work round than a fix. It leaves, as a colleague of mine would say  a ‘sub-optimal’ configuration

Open the VM Appliance summary tab

select Edit Settings and swap the VLAN assignments

In this case I configured 

VM Network adapter 1 in VLAN 302 and
VM Network adapter 2 in VLAN 301 

This results in this configuration.

No Default Gateway

I have already mentioned that there is a command to set the initial IP address for the GUI access to actually configure the appliance.   

The command is z-set-inital-address. Below is a screenshot that shows the default gateway is left as 0.0.0.0 after running this command.

at the console type netstat –rnv to show the gateway

If the above happens to you type route add default gw <gateway_ip>

In my case

route add default gw 10.0.74.65

and then navigate to the GUI to do the initial config as normal.

Quick look under the bonnet

The main ZTM files live in /opt/zeus

Nic config is in

/etc/network/interfaces

Hope this helps