Milestone 2 AD and vCenter - nicolas-tullio/Tech-Journal GitHub Wiki

Server 19 and VCSA ISOs

  • Firstly I enabled SSH on ESXI in order to connect from mgmt01
  • Once connected, I used wget to pull the respective ISOs from the shared drive

AD-350

Standard AD machine deployment here for the most part, though I accidently purposefully challenged myself to use Server Core instead of desktop making the more intricate tasks like DNS record creation a bit time-consuming. No real challenges here.

VCenter Installation & Licensing

vCenter installation is done via the mgmt box and is a fairly simple prompted process. One almost fatal mistake I made was not documenting the administrator password during the installation. Fortunately, I found steps to reset it. Those are the following:

Connect to vCenter Server Appliance through SSH. Run /usr/lib/vmware-vmdir/bin/vdcadmintool

This console loads:

================================ Please select: 0. exit

  1. Test LDAP connectivity
  2. Force start replication cycle
  3. Reset account password
  4. Set log level and mask
  5. Set vmdir state ================================

Press 3 to enter the Reset account password option. When prompted for the Account DN, enter:

cn=Administrator,cn=users,dc=vSphere,dc=local

A new password is generated.

This was extremely helpful and meant I didn't have to start over. I then added a new datacenter to connect my Super Micro host and access my created VMs.

Licensing

In Administration > Licenses, add the provided keys and assign them to their respective systems using the "Assets" tab. Confirm that the licenses are working as expected.

vCenter and AD SSO setup

Lastly, we had to domain join vCenter. To do this go to Administration > Single Sign On > Configuration. Join using admin credentials and reboot. Finally, add Domain Admins to the vCenter Administrators group.

Reflection

My biggest note to add here would be to verify time and date settings before everything else. As it stands right now my environment is setup correctly but I may look into redoing AD as a Server 2019 Desktop for easier use.