In the last post we installed vCenter 6.7. If you haven’t seen it, you can find it here. In this post we will complete the configuration aspect of vCenter to get it up and running. If you have not created your forward and reverse lookup records. You will have issues.
Once the installer has completed you can jump right in to configuration. You will have four options. Setup, Upgrade, Migration and Restore.
With the new 6.7 appliance, backups are incredibly easy and allow you to restore your vCenter server in a couple minutes. That will be a future article stay tuned!
After selecting “Set Up” you will be asked to confirm your network settings. Once you click next those settings will be final and you will only be able to change basic IP addressing like DNS though the management console.
After IP addressing, we need to set up the SSO domain. The SSO domain is the boundary for vCenter. Think of it like an Active Directory forest, anything within the same SSO domain can communicate with each other and replicate. In deployments like Embedded Linked Mode or Enhanced Linked Mode the same SSO domain allows you to view multiple vCenter servers from a single console. Something that is extremely useful in geographically diverse clusters.
Since this is our first vCenter server, we will be creating a new SSO Domain. For SSO settings, I like to use the standard vsphere.local. You can name this whatever you want.
Once you finalize your SSO settings you will be prompted to join the Customer Experience Improvement Program.
After joining/not joining the installer will finish. Remember most of these changes are final. You will have to redeploy vCenter or leverage the CLI to change them.
Once the installer has finished, you will be prompted to navigate to the IP/FQDN of the server. You will have to select either the HTML5 or FLEX client. As of vCenter 6.7d the HTML5 client is not fully feature rich so you may have to use 2 consoles. The login screen will look like this.
The username will be [email protected] and the password will be the one you defined when configuring the SSO domain. In a later blog we will integrate vCenter with Active Directory for centralized management of users.
After logging in, you will have access to vCenter and the ability to add hosts.
Stay tuned for future posts about Nested Virtualization, vCenter HA, Embedded Linked Mode, and Active Directory Integration for vCenter.
Virtualized Taylor 