Now that we are pretty far into this series, we can finally install our Windows vCenter. This will leverage our external PSC, for maximum scalability. Depending on your environment size, you may need to scale up the VM's hardware specs for optimal performance. Consult VMware documentation for sizing guidance. In this exercise...
One of the lesser known SSL certificates in the vSphere 6.0 product is called the VMware Directory Service certificate. This is used by the built-in LDAP server for authentication and encryption. It's most an internal use only certificate, and one that some customers may not worry about replacing. In fact, per...
As mentioned in my vSphere 6.0 installation series, you can configure the new VMCA to be a subordinate to your enterprise CA. This is great, and opens up new certificate management options for organizations that wish to use trusted SSL certificates. However, you may run into a situation where this...
Back in Part 11 of this series we configured the VMCA to be a subordinate CA to our enterprise CA. This ensures that all certificates which get used by vCenter components are automatically trusted. But as previously mentioned, not all organizations can use the VMCA. The US Federal Government would...
As mentioned in my vSphere 6.0 install part 3, VMware has introduced a new certificate option in this release. You can now make a built-in VMware certificate authority (VMCA) a subordinate to your enterprise CA. This is great news, as it will allow some automation of the certificate deployment process....
New to my vSphere installation series is using the pre-packaged vCenter appliance (VCSA). Now that the VCSA is on par with the Windows vCenter server, I suspect more and more people will migrate to the appliance. So to that end, let's install an external PSC using the VCSA. If you...
VMware has provided new SSL template guidance for vSphere 6.0. New to vSphere 6.0 are machine SSL certificates, solution user certificates, and using the VMCA as a subordinate CA. If you are using an enterprise Microsoft CA, then this article is for you. I'll show you how to create the...
Now that we have the PSC installed, it's time to configure the variables for the Toolkit script, and also make sure we can download our root certificates. Depending on your configuration, you may need to manually download your root public certificates. VMware needs certificates in a specific format, and they...
Now that we have the Windows PSC installed, it is time to prepare for installing vCenter. vCenter can support three database types: embedded vPostGres (supports up to 20 hosts and 2000 VMs), Microsoft SQL, and Oracle. SQL seems to be the most popular choice, so that's what I'll help you...
In this installment of the vSphere 6.0 installation how-to series we cover upgrading ESXi hosts, VMs, and VMFS. You do need to understand ESXi/VM/VMFS upgrade best practices, recommended order, and gotchas. That’s what this post is for. Blog Series vSphere 6.0 Install Pt. 1: Introduction vSphere 6.0 Install Pt. 2: Platform Services Controller vSphere...