They’re fresh out, they contain a whole load of enhancements, and if you’re a vExpert or enthusiast running a homelab, then you’ll most likely want to get a look at the new vSphere 6.0 Update 2 stuff ASAP. Time to quickly upgrade the vCenter Appliance and ESXi hosts to take advantage of the HTML5 interface, built in Host Client, VSAN 6.2 and so on. This is assuming you’re not an enterprise with enterprise ways and means, of course…

The Inventory service came about as a separate item in vSphere 5.x and is the place where all of your web client tags get stored (you ARE using tags, right?) but it also gets used to cache queries destined for the vCenter database from the web client, which reduces the load on the vCenter server database. It’s also a database that grows substantially if you ever recover a load of VMs with SRM or similar, but that’s another story.

So, you’ve got a nice new vCenter 6 up and running, maybe you have an external PSC as well? Jolly good! Now what? There’s a whole bunch of additional configuration items that you should look at amending before too long. Log in as your SSO Admin account - administrator@vsphere.local (or whatever you changed it to during the installation) and away we go. Let’s start with something new - the Download Remote Console option.

Following directly on from my previous post where I install a PSC, it’s time for a vCenter. There’s not a lot of point having one without the other. The webpage I used to install the PSC is still open so I can just click on Install again and accept the EULA again and it is right back to the connecting to target server options once more. The same options as last time for this.

So at last, vSphere 6 release day. Let’s crack on with this new PSC stuff! vSphere 6.0 splits vCenters into a Platform Services Controller piece (SSO, licensing, Certificates - all the bits that really tie your setup together) and the vCenter installation itself. These can be on the same server (VM, right?) or different servers, creating stand-alone PSC’s which can be load balanced and so on. The vCenter Deployment Guide has been available for a few days already and that is really a step by step guide through the installations that you can do.

At this point, I am not going to go in to detail about the installation of SRM 5.x, as there are already lots of good blog posts / series out there about this. SRM 6.x though, fair game! However, I wanted to lay out some of the changes that should be made after an installation of your SRM environment before you start your testing, to give you the best chance of success as possible.

A few oddities I have discovered recently when working on one of my lab environments, so I thought that I would note them here for my own ends if nothing else. It is possible that a Windows Server based vCenter 5.5 (in my case) will not start after a reboot with the error message in vpxd.log reporting “Unable to create SSO facade: Invalid response code: 404 Not Found”. The quick way to fix this is to restart the VMware Secure Token Service, as per VMware KB2061412.