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Johnny Foulds edited this page Aug 12, 2019 · 2 revisions

vCenter was deployed with the help of the instructions found in the Video References section.

Important Notes:

  • It should be noted that it is not possible/very hard to deploy an old version such as VMware-VCSA-all-6.5.0-4602587.iso because it contains an expired root password -https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/51124.
  • VMware-VCSA-all-6.5.0-14020092.iso was deployed to my lab environment.
  • It is also important to know that if your ESXi host is 6.5 you cannot use a later version such as VMware-VCSA-all-6.7.0-14070457.iso.
  • The installation caused me a lot of frustration, part of it was the DNS name - to simply it just set IP assignment to DHCP in the wizard for the initial install.

Watching Log Files

If you use the Windows UI Installer the installation progress can be monitored by watching the log file:

tail -f /mnt/c/Users/[USER_NAME]/AppData/Local/Temp/vcsaUiInstaller/installer-*.log

On Linux this would be:

tail -f /tmp/vcsaUiInstaller/installer-[LOG_ID].log

Installation Frustration

I found the deployment of VMWare vCenter 5.6 to be a frustrating process. The problem that on old ISOs the root password expired also does complicate the situation. A possible solution is to wait when the VM first boot and then login with root and password vmware, you will then be asked to change the password which you can set to the same you used during the installation wizard.

It's not DNS

There's no way it's DNS

It was DNS

Eventually I just left the VMware-VCSA-all-6.7.0-14070457.iso install running over night and the Wizard still had a time-out error but the system could be configured at: https://vcenter-server:5480/

More Frustration

After doing an update of vCenter and a reboot the web UI simply showed:

503 Service Unavailable (Failed to connect to endpoint: [N7Vmacore4Http20NamedPipeServiceSpecE:0x0000564633eaa380] _serverNamespace = / action = Allow _pipeName =/var/run/vmware/vpxd-webserver-pipe)

Unfortunately it looks like vCenter is rather temperamental and there are many references online of administrators experiencing this same problem. In this specific case it was easily remedied by SSH into the server and executing the following command to start all services:

service-control --start --all

Video References

Web References

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