Today I learned one little trick. You know when you create an isolated Org VDC network in vCloud Director there is always one armed Edge deployed in it which does nothing but provides a DHCP service? If you do not need it then you have to go to Configure Services on the Network and disable DHCP and it will destroy the Edge. Well it is actually possible to get rid of it right away if you define static IP Pool that covers all available IPs on the subnet while creating the network.
Example: If I define gateway address 192.168.1.1/24 and define static pool 192.168.1.2-192.168.1.254 no Edge will be deployed.
I could think of two use cases when it could be useful:
1. It speeds up the deployment and put less strain on the vSphere environment, which can be handy during automated provisioning of large number of isolated networks.
2. If you create very large subnet (A class for example) the Edge deployment will error out with message “VSM response error (10014): Configuration failed on vShield Edge vm vm-11689. (invalid dhcp config: ) – Failed to configure services on the network.“. This is caused by very large DHCP range. So the workaround is to use the trick with large IP Pool.
