Installation of ESXI Server 5.5 and its components (vCenter SSO, vSphere Web Client, vCenter Inventory Service and vCenter Server Part 4

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Part4. VMware vCenter Server Installation
VMware vCenter Server is the management system for your VMware vSphere private cloud.
It’s used to manage your clusters of ESXi servers, configure HA, DRS and vMotion, manage your virtual networks and their interfaces to the physical network.
It also can be used to provision storage and create virtual machines, including templates and other wonderful things. You may need to find right plugin to manage your SAN using Vcenter.
VCenter Server can be Physical or Virtual. We required 64-Bit DSN to access the vCenter database.
Minimum requirements for the vCenter Server 5.5/5.5 U1 are as follows:
For detailed OS and Database information please refer to the Host OS section of the VMware vSphere Compatibility Matrix and the VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes.
To install vCenter Server, First we need to install SQL Server 2012.
SQL Server installation
a)      Download SQL Server 2012 from Microsoft.
b)      Obtain the license key for the edition of SQL that you wish to run, Launch the SQL Server Installation Center
c)      Click “New SQL Server standalone installation or add new features to an existing installation”
d)     Follow wizard and Select “SQL Server Feature Installation” and click Next. Select two following features
a.       Database Engine
b.      Management Tools
e)      SQL server will check some system compatibility, once it’s finished, select “default instance” (MSSQLSERVER) or create a named instance of your required name.
f)       At this stage you can choose to either run your SQL Server services under the NTSERVICE and LOCALSYSTEM or your own domain based user service accounts.
Note: If you decide to use domain based user account for the service account, you should register an SPN (Service Principal Name) in Active Directory for that domain user account.
On a domain controller run the following:
setspn –A MSSQLSvc/:1433
setspn –A MSSQLSvc/:1433
g)      Specify if you want to run SQL in mixed mode authentication or Windows auth only.
h)      You can also set the data directories for the SQL database files (.MDF, .LDF) to seperate drives if you require in the “data directories” tab.
i)        Specify the full adminisrators of this SQL Server. By default this is the local administrators group.
j)        Once installation finished, Logged on as a user part of the local administrators group, use windows authentication to connect to “localhost” or your servers hostname.
k)      Open SQL Server Management Studio, Expand Security and Create a new login
l)        Give the SQL user a username/password and choose SQL authentication
m)    Under Server Roles for the user make sure only public is ticked. Click Ok to create the user.
n)      Create a new database for your vCenter Server, Give it a name, Set the initial size to something like 200 MB.
o)      Set the recovery model to simple to save the log growing to large.
p)      Go back to your SQL user you created and set their default database to the vCenter database.
q)      Under user mapping set them as dbo of the vCenter database you created. Click Ok.
r)       On the vCenter server create a 64-bit system DSN.
Note: Ensure you have installed the SQL native client on the vCenter server if you are using a remote SQL server
vCenter Server installation

 

1.      Start vCenter Server installation, Follow wizard , Enter Licence key and accept T&C.
2.      If deploying a small scale deployment (5 hosts and upto 50 VMs) you can choose to use SQL Server 2008 Express (which is actually 2008 R2)!.
If using an full SQL server installation (either local or remote) like we are here, ensure you created a 64-bit DSN, choose to use an existing database and select your DSN.
3.      Enter the credentials for your ODBC connection
4.      Choose to run the vCenter service under the “SYSTEM” account or recommended user-specified account. “This can be a standard active directory account with local administrator rights on the vCenter server. The account will be grated “Log on as a service” right on the server.”
5.      As this will be the first vCenter installation choose “Create a standalone VMware vCenter Server Instance”. You would create linked mode vCenter servers if you have muliple vCenter servers, most likley if you were deploying a vCenter at two different datacenters for use with Site Recovery Manager.
6.      Verify the ports to use for vCenter server, change if required, Select deployment inventory size, the JVM memory for vCenter server web services

7.      Enter your vCenter Single Sign On administrator credentials to register with vCenter server SSO. Also Enter lookup service URL, Accept Cert

8.      Register the Administrators user group with vCenter Single Sign On (make sure the user group box is ticked). This way anyone that is a local administrator on this server can manage vCenter (inc domain admins).
9.      Ensure the correct vCenter Inventory Service address is entered.  Wait to complete the process, click next if required.  
10.  The installation of vCenter server will complete, Click Finish.

Note: To install vCenter on domain controller use this commande 
VMware-viclient-all-5.5.0-1281650.exe /VSKIP_OS_CHECKS=”1″

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