vSphere 6 - Reconfigure Embedded vCenter to External PSC

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:

vSphere New PSC Deployment - Could Not Parse SAML Token For Authentication

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.