Got some cycles in on the lab today and decided to work on vCenter Server Appliance. The first thing that you need to take care of is local DNS. In the past I have always run a windows server. I decided to see about an appliance. Infoblox has one, and so does Men and Mice. Both led to registration, request for downloads. Which I still haven’t received. As I was poking around and I found the VM that was my old DNS server. I was able to import and update it without too much Yak Shaving. DNS, ✓
Its been a while since I have installed the Appliance. I was a bit surprised to find out that the appliance is still heavily dependent on Windows to install. There is plenty of docs and blogs on how to install the appliance, so I won’t duplicate here. At a high level you mount the ISO to a windows image, install a windows program, and then that program deploys the Linux Appliance.
The windows dependency comes in because while the end product is an appliance, it is an appliance that can have many configurations. The installation wizard (the aforementioned windows component) leads you through a series of questions. Do you want to embed the platform controller? Is this a stand alone platform controller? What about SSO? Do you want to use Postgres or Oracle? The install actually builds the Appliance based on your answers. Hence why an ISO versus an OVA.
The windows install (OVA builder) took about 20 minutes to run. Just when I thought things had gone wrong and started to go look for log files, it finished.
After an EBKBAC error I was able to log in. I must have mistyped my login. For the life of me I could not log in. Then I read the fine print about close the window and try again. Once I did that I was able to log in and have vCenter running.
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