Anyways, the new vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 (vCSA) has a different installation process.
- First download the .iso from VMWare
- Mount and unpack the contents to a folder on a Windows machine (there are other ways as well but hey…)
Yes, you need a Windows machine to install the vCenter Appliance on a virtual environment. No ovf available and there is no *nix version.
As I have a small virtual environment and I will install every part on one appliance, the prerequisites for the vCSA implementation are:
- Disk: 120 Gb
- Memory: 10 Gb RAM
- CPU’s: 2
Installation
I’m using a Windows 7 machine (under Parallels 10 on my iMac) on which I have copied and extracted the .iso file contents.
The installation process is done through a browser.
- Let’s double-click on the “vcsa-setup” file
Well, not off to a great start but let’s try again 😉
- Navigate into the “vcsa” folder and run the “VMWare-ClientIntegrationPlugin-6.0.0”
The installation of the plugin is straightforward.
- Navigate to the folder where you extracted the .iso and double-click “vcsa-setup”
- Click “Install”
- Accept the EULA and click “Next”
- The target server, in my case, is my N2BC node. Enter the IP address for the ESXi host and the root account info
A certificate error will pop-up because self-signed certificates are used.
- The appliance name is the name used to identify the VM itself on an ESXi node, it is not used as part URL for the webclient
- Create a password for the vCenter root user
- I will use a single platform as vcenter, so select the top radiobutton, click Next
- The Single-Sign-On domain is used to authenticate within vCenter, as I only have one (and no real naming convention) it does not really matter what I put here. Just make sure it is within the allowed charset (press the “i” to verify)
- Select the Tiny size and Click Next
- Select the target storage LUN to place the vCenter Appliance on
- Really VMWare, calling it a ‘Thin Disk Mode’ ?! Well they mean, Thin-Provisioning, and yes please.
- Select the Embedded Database and Click Next
- Here you add the network settings for the vCenter Appliance
- Make sure you have created the DNS entry and Reverse Lookup Pointer in your DNS server beforehand. The installation will break if it cannot resolve the address!
- The last screen shows a summary. Click Finish to start the installation.
- The installation will take about 18 mins
To illustrate the performance on N2BC during the install, this is the CPU graph. You can clearly see when I started the install.
- Open a new browser tab and navigate to the vcenter server URL
- Well ain’t that a pickle, you need Adobe Flash ! tssk tssk VMWare, not done! Unfortunately there is no way around this, so install Adobe Flash
And there you have it, a freshly installed vCenter Appliance. The Appliance is running on a 60-day evaluation license so make sure to add a real license within that timeperiod otherwise all the hosts, VM’s will be kicked out!
Keep in mind that you cannot mix’n’match license keys so if you purchased ESXi Essentials (or ESXi Essentials Plus) you can’t manage these hosts with a vCenter Standard licensed server!
Note: while you CAN login as root into the webclient, there is NOTHING that can be configured due to permission issues. You will not be able to see the newly installed vCenter Server, it is simply nowhere to be found.
Make sure you login using your defined SSO Domain in front of the Administrator username!
Now the under ‘vCenter Servers’ the vCenter Server FQDN shows up.