vCenter Configuration Manager – First Run

Aka vSphere Hardening – Part 6

In Part 4 of this series, we ended with the collection of Data from our vCenter Server.

Before we continue, I will point to a few issues I have encountered while working with vCM.

First, while opening one of the Dashboards (Console -> Dashboards -> Select dashboard), the following error message was received; “An error has occurred performing an SRS security request. You must use Internet Explorer with the Run as administrator option to view dashboard reports when working locally on the Collector.”
VMware has multiple Knowledge Base articles discussing this error. The one that solved the problem in my case was KB “SSRS authentication must be configured in two-tier and three-tier installation environments that use Basic authentication (2000082)”. Also note, I run a one-tier installation!

But that was not all…

vCenter Server Appliance Greenfield deployment

Recently, I needed to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA from now on) in an environment under the following conditions:

• ESXi host have been installed and configured.
• ESXi hosts reside in a different VLAN then the VCSA.
• DNS servers are not available at the time of the installation.
• Not much time.

The first step is to deploy the VCSA. So connect the vSphere Client to an ESXi host and start the deployment. The wizard walks you through some of the details, like name, location, storage location and network mapping. If you have ever deployed the VCSA on a vCenter Server, you will notice that this crucial window is missing. So we are not able to provide information like the IP address.

Figure 1