Sometimes you feel like implementing a powerful edge gateway in your VMware vCloud environment. Let’s say you have heavy load and you plan to use load balancer capability of edge gateway in VMware vCloud Director. Unfortunately hardware configuration of vShield edge gateways are not customizable through vCloud Director and changing hardware configuration through vCenter is not possible. Also, hardware templates for use as edge gateways are limited in terms of processing power and memory. There are 3 pre-defined hardware configurations in vCloud Director 5.5: Compact, Full and Full-4. Full-4 type is a new one in vCloud 5.5 and as I know Full gateways in vCloud 5 are upgraded to Full-4 automatically when you upgrade the infrastructure to version 5.5. In brief, hardware configurations for vShield edge gateways are as follows:

• Compact: 1 * vCPU and 256 MB of Memory – 64000 concurrent sessions
• Full: 2 * vCPU and 1024 MB of Memory – 1,000,000 concurrent sessions
• Full-4 (new in vCloud 5.5): 4 * vCPU and 1024 MB of Memory

I didn’t find updated detailed information for vCloud 5.5 but you can see more details about edge gateway specifications and performance parameters in vCloud Director 5.1 at this useful link.
As you see, hardware power is limited especially in regards to memory. So, in case you need a memory intensive edge gateway (Load balancer is a good example) you need to upgrade the hardware. Although there is no direct method to this through vCloud Director admin panel, the fact is that vShield Manager has this capability to implement x-large gateways. x-large edge gateway in VMware Networking and Security 5.5 has 4 * vCPU and 8GB of Memory that is quite considerable.

As VMware recommended, if you need to upgrade hardware configuration of an edge gateway in vCloud Director, you can use vShield portal to do so. As it’s shown in the following picture, login to vShield Manager admin panel, choose your Datacenter, on ‘Network Virtualization’ tab select ‘Edges’, click on the edge gateway you intend to upgrade and finally from Actions menu choose: ‘Convert to X-Large’. That’s all.

Just keep in mind that in the picture above login to vShield Manager is done via vCenter. So, the ‘Network Virtualization’ tab shown in the figure is within vCenter; however it’s a bit difficult to get into vShield Manager through vCenter and I faced some weird errors about Acrobot Adobe! As a result, I recommend to use vShield Manager directly to avoid such issues.