vSphere 5 vCenter Server Virtual Appliance Quick-Start Guide

vSphere 5 vCenter Server Virtual Appliance Quick-Start Guide

Posted by Hugo Phan ⋅ July 15, 2011 ⋅ 89 Comments

Filed Under  configuring vcenter, Oracle, oracle database, vcenter, vcenter linux, vcenter linux appliance, vcenter linux virtual appliance, vcenter virtual appliance, vcsa, vsphere5

The vCenter Server Linux Virtual Appliance (vCSA) is a preconfigured Linux-based virtual machine that is optimized for running vCenter Server and associated services.
This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to deploy the vCSA, configure networking, authentication, database and vCenter services.  For further information regarding the vCSA please refer to this post and this post.  To use an external Oracle database instead of the embedded DB2 database, please see this post.
For more information about the vCSA, please see the resources listed here http://vmwire.com/vmware-vcenter-server-virtual-appliance-vcsa/.
Note: This article was written using the release candidate version of the software so your experience with the GA version may differ slightly.
The following table lists the required files that you will need, gather these files before proceeding.

Description	Filename	Location	Size (KB)
vCenter Appliance .cert file	VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.0.0.2968-380565_OVF10.cert		2
vCenter Appliance .mf file	VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.0.0.2968-380565_OVF10.mf		1
vCenter Appliance .ovf file that is used to import the appliance onto a vSphere server	VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.0.0.2968-380565_OVF10.ovf		9
vCenter Appliance data disk	VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.0.0.2968-380565-data		43,365
vCenter Appliance system disk	VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.0.0.2968-380565-system		4,029,063
vSphere 5 Client	VMware-viclient-en-5.0.0-380461		310,475

Watch the 10-minute video (Optimised for iPad)

Deploy the vCenter Server Linux Virtual Appliance

1. Launch your vSphere Client and navigate to File | Deploy OVF Template.
2. Browse to the location of the vCenter Appliance .ovf file, then click on Open.
3. On the following screen click on Next.
4. Then click on Next again on the OVF Template Details page.
5. Under Name and Location, give your vCenter Appliance a name then click Next.
6. Choose a datastore then click Next.
7. Select a disk format on the next page then click on Next to continue.
8. Click on Finish to start deploying.

Configuring the vCenter Server Linux Virtual Appliance

1. Boot the appliance.
2. Open a vSphere Client console session to the virtual appliance and configure the network and timezone.
3. Now open up a browser and type https://:5480 to continue the configuration.
4. Accept the certificate error to continue.
5. Login as root, the default password is vmware.

1. Now read through every single word of the EULA and click on Accept EULA to continue. Please be patient whilst the vCenter is configured. If you look at the appliance remote console you’ll see the services being configured and started.

1. You can start using the web interface again once the console screen returns to default.

1. Next click on Status, and view the current status of the vCenter Server. The service should be on a Stopped state and the Database Type should show not configured.
2. Click on the tab, you will notice that there are no DNS Servers configured and the appliance’s hostname is the standard localhost.localdom, lets change this.
3. Click on and change to your relevant values and click on to complete the network configuration.
4. Now setup authentication by clicking on and then on either NIS or Active Directory. My lab environment uses AD.
5. Click on the tick box and then fill in your domain details and then click on Save Settings. You should receive an Operation is successful message to confirm that the authentication settings has worked.
6. We now need to configure a database for vCenter to use, for this article, let’s use the embedded DB2 database. Click on to continue.
7. When using the embedded database, there is no need to enter any details, just click on . This will take a while to complete, once done click on . After some time the database will complete configuration.
8. Now reboot the virtual appliance one last time. To reboot click on and then click on . Click Reboot again to confirm.
9. This time the vCenter Appliance will successfully start the vpxd daemon and initialize the database, eventually vCenter 5.0 will be ready for you to use.

Connecting to vCenter 5.0 for the first time

With all VMware vSphere Clients, when you start the vSphere Client and connect to either a vCenter Server or an ESX/ESXi host, it will check whether the vSphere Client is compatible. This is still the case with vSphere 5.0 and you will need to update your vSphere Client if you haven’t already done so. You can update by connecting to vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi or you can download the vSphere Client executable from the VMware Downloads website.

1. Launch the vSphere Client and connect to your newly configured vCenter Server.
2. You must use root | vmware to login, domain credentials will not work until the permissions are added to vCenter.

1. Update the vSphere Client as necessary.
2. Add an AD group into vCenter permissions and set the role as Administrator. [See video].
3. Now you will be able to log in with domain credentials.
4. You will need to enter your username in DOMAIN\Username or username@DOMAIN format.

It is also possible to just use the vSphere Web Client by opening up a browser session to https://<ip_of_vCSA>:9443/vsphere-client/