The single sign on used to be a fairly painless portion of vCenter (once we got to 5.5, in 5.0 it was a major pain). It was essentially a lightweight directory (vsphere.local) and gateway to active directory. The platform services controller (PSC) of vCenter 6 is a completely different animal. It performs a lot of new functions that are not easy to transfer between instances. For example the PSC does the following:
- Handles and stores SSL certificates
- Handles and stores license keys
- Handles and stores permissions via global permissions layer
- Handles and stores replication of Tags and Catagories
- Built in automation replication between different sites
Why does it do all these and why do I care?
Well VMware has come to understand that virtual machines cannot be bound to a specific location more and more customer want Hybrid and multi-site capabilities while keeping the same management. A lot of the management functions are based around Tags and permissions have a over arching layer to provide that functionality is huge. I assume that we are going to see more features passed up to the PSC layer in order to make cross site/ vCenter features available.
Architectural change
In 6.0 VMware changed the architecture to have external PSC’s as a preferred mode of operation. In fact they support up to 8 replicated PSC’s and they have two constructs that matter:
- Domain (traditionally this has been vsphere.local)
- Sites (Physical locations)
Site designation changes how the PSC’s and their multi-masters replicate (choosing to replicate to a single instance at each site then have that instance replicate to local nodes)
The change to external PSC’s is a challenge for many users. First let me be clear about a challenge you can only have one domain: merging domains is not supported. Once you get to 6 you cannot leave a domain and join a different domain I have not seen instructions to do it and it does not seem to be supported. In 5 you can leave a SSO domain and join a different domain so if you are still on 5 and wish to join multiple machines to the same domain do it while on 5 using SSO. If you wish to move from an embeded PSC to an external PSC the process is pretty simple:
- Install a new PSC (can be windows or Linux) joined to the embedded PSC
- Repoint the vCenter to the new PSC (instructions here)
- Remove the old PSC
The key takeaway for all of you who might have slotted off during this article is this: Make any topology changes to vCenter domains before upgrading to 6.