Following last year's pattern of 'lettered' vCenter updates, VMware has released vCenter 5.5a. (Note the 'a'.) This addresses a number of issues, mostly with the SSO service. If you are using vCenter on Windows Server 2012, you will no longer have to download a patched DLL. You can find the...
Now that vCenter is fully installed, now it's time to replace the self-signed certificate for the vCenter service and Orchestrator. Since we've already replaced the other certificates (SSO, Inventory, etc.) this process is a piece of cake. If you haven't been following this series to the letter and have all...
The previous 14 installments have all been leading up to this, installing vCenter. Yes, we are finally here. In this post we install vCenter, the windows vSphere client, fix profile driven storage, and configure vCenter to support a clustered SQL database. This post is not the end of the road,...
We are just one post away from installing the actual vCenter service! Now that the rest of the infrastructure is ready, we need to create a service account, databases and DSNs. After all of these steps are completed we can rejoice and very shortly have a working vCenter server. Remember...
The vCenter inventory service has two primary purposes in life. First, it's a cache of objects which the web client accesses. This cache enables the offloading of retrieving objects from the vCenter core service (vpxd). This can also lessen the load on your back-end database if the vCenter service isn't...
Now that the SSO service and web client are installed, it's time to do a little SSO configuration. In this installment we will configure the SSO STS certificate chain, add an Active Directory identity and source, and delegate SSO administrative rights to a AD group. If you recall the vCenter...
The web client is the new and strongly preferred mechanism to manage your vSphere environment. In fact, the Windows VI client now comes up with a big warning that it's going the way of the dodo bird when you launch it. I suspect in vSphere 6.0 the Windows VI client...
Just like replacing a hip joint, replacing vCenter SSO SSL certificates can induce some pain, is a bit complex, and the outcome can be questionable. The replacement process in SSO 5.5 is pretty much like that in 5.1, but now we have the VMware certificate automation tool and my vCenter...
Not everyone has an online Microsoft Certificate Authority, or maybe my toolkit script has issues in your environment. So in this installment we will go over manual SSL minting. By that I mean we will use my Toolkit script to create the CSRs, you will download the certificates yourself, then run my...
In the last installment of the vSphere 5.5Â series we installed the SSO service. Now that the Java JRE is installed (via the SSO installer), we have the tools ready to create our vCenter SSL certificates via an online Microsoft CA. If you don't have an online Microsoft CA that can...