vsphere

Introduction Starting with vSphere 6, there are two main roles to a core vCenter infrastructure. The vCenter Server (VC) and the Platform Services Controller (PSC). During deployment, administrators are presented with two deployment options: Embedded. With an embedded deployment, the VC and PSC roles are installed on the same node External. With an external deployment, the PSC and VC roles are installed onto separate nodes. External deployment also enables the enhanced linked mode feature for vCenter Server Prior to 6.

In the busy world we live in, a lot can be said for the “time flies when you’re having fun” saying. And with so much happening in the world of the SDDC, it’s easy to forget about some of the core components that, for the most part, sit there reasonably quietly just ‘doing their thing’. This is just a quick reminder post for those still running vSphere 5.0 or 5.1, that end of general support ends for those products this week, on the 24th of August to be exact.

For my lab, I run everything nested within VMWare workstation, which is running on a single Dell physical host that runs Windows for the base OS. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to spend a bit more time in the lab, mostly for learning some components of the vSphere environment I’m not familiar with, but also as a test area. I deliberately started the environment with a single embedded deployment, so the PSC and VC server was running on the one node.

Introduction As of vSphere 6.0U1, VMware allow an embedded vCenter server deployment to be reconfigured to an external deployment, which demotes the Platform Services Controller (PSC) components of the embedded node and points the VC server to an external PSC node which resides in the same Single Sign On (SSO) domain as the source embedded node. This is done by using the utility cmsso-util Before we get too much further, there are two main uses for cmsso-util:

In my lab, I deployed vCenter using the appliance as an embedded node using vCenter 6.0.0b. I purposely deployed this build, as an embedded deployment for two reasons: I haven’t used the appliance before, and I wanted the lab to be simple, but I also wanted to see the upgrade process in action on the appliance I wanted to deploy an external PSC and follow the process to re point the original VC server to the new external PSC, as outlined here: http://pubs.