vCloud Director Gotchas for Log Insight

For those of you deploying Log Insight on vCloud Director (VCD) I wanted to point out a couple gotchas to be aware of. Read on to learn more.

VCD does not respect the OVF specification sizing option: The result is that when you deploy Log Insight you do not have the option to specify the size of the instance — small through large. Of course, you can manually configure the size after the deployment step and even create a template with the desired size. However, there is a second gotcha.
VCD’s quota mechanism uses the largest specified sizing option in the OVF specification regardless of what the virtual appliance is actually configured for: This means you may deploy and configure LI on VCD to be 4 CPU and 8 GB of memory however your quota for the VM will be 16 CPU and 32 GB of memory.

To get around both gotchas the following steps are recommended:

Deploy the LI OVA to a vSphere instance
Specify the desired size of the LI instance during the vSphere deployment operation
(Optional) Power on the LI instance and allow it to complete the firstboot operation then power off the instance.

Note: Do NOT configure LI via the UI (more on this in a future post)
Export the LI instance in OVA format
Import the exported LI instance into VCD

Note the gotchas listed here are VCD limitations and not LI limitations — other products (e.g. vR Ops) will suffer from the same gotchas.