PSC

Overview A few weeks ago VMware released vSphere 6.7U1, and in that release comes a tool that has been desired by many customers and partners, which is the vCenter Converge Tool, or in other words, a tool to convert an external vCenter and PSC architecture in to an embedded deployment. In the last few releases of vCenter Server, VMware have supported replication of the PSC functionality between embedded deployment models, including Enhanced Linked Mode (named Embedded Linked Mode for an embedded deployment). It has been clear that the embedded model should now be the default model and it is the recommended model from VMware, in fact last week VMware announced their plans to deprecate the external PSC, but until today we did not have a way to automatically converge an external model in to an embedded model. ...

Hi all, This is just a quick note to let you all know of a limitation with vSphere 6.5. Repointing of a vCenter Server to a Platform Services Controller (PSC) in another vSphere SSO domain SITE is not supported. Please see the caution at the top of this VMware KB article. Note: As of 21/11/2016, the KB article for repointing a VC to a PSC WITHIN the same SSO domain site (see here) also has a caution to say it is not supported with 6.5. I believe this is a mistake in the KB article, as the 6.5 documentation has steps on how to repoint within the same SSO site, and I’ve reached out to the product manager Adam Eckerle who also believes this is an error and is investigating. ...

Introduction This article will walk through the steps required to repoint a vCenter Server 6U1 or later node to a different Platform Services Controller (PSC) node. Scenario one will walk through the steps if the destination PSC is located within the same vSphere SSO site, where as scenario two will walk through the steps if the destination PSC is located in a different vSphere SSO site. This is almost the same process, but repointing a VC to a PSC in a different SSO Site than the original PSC requires an additional step. ...

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 6.0U1, you had the ability to repoint a VC node to another PSC within the same vSphere SSO site using vmafd-cli. See VMware KB 2113917 for the steps. You could not repoint the VC node to a PSC in a different SSO site, even if it was in the same SSO domain. ...

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. I also made the decision to run the lab with the appliance. We run the appliance in production, and it is clear that this is the preferred deployment method from VMWare. ...

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.vmware.com/vsphere-60/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.upgrade.doc%2FGUID-E7DFB362-1875-4BCF-AB84-4F21408F87A6.html My lab is deployed in a nested environment sitting on top of VMWare Workstation. So I deployed a new node to the environment which was an external PSC, joined to the original SSO domain and site. ...