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You are here: Home / VCSA / How do I find my SSO Server 5.5 Site name?

How do I find my SSO Server 5.5 Site name?

12.10.2013 by William Lam // 11 Comments

During an SSO (Single-Sign On) Server 5.5 installation, you may have noticed a new input parameter called Site Name that you must now specify. This new Site name is meant to help users identify a specific SSO Server when more than one exists in an environment and used mainly for groupings today.

Note: Something to be aware of is that the Site Name can not be changed after installation which is a bit unfortunate, so choose carefully.

When adding an additional Windows-based SSO Server to an existing environment, a drop down list will automatically be populated with all the Site names. This is great if the Site name you selected makes sense (ideally it would) but in case you did not choose a specific name or forgot the relationship between the Site name and the SSO Server, then this can potentially post a challenge.

In my lab I have been recently doing some "SSO" testing and I needed to figure out the Site name for one a vCenter Server running on Windows as well as for a VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance). With a bit of digging and testing, here is how you can find the Site name for a given SSO Server.

Note: Since the VCSA is a pre-built Virtual Appliance, the Site name has already been configured to to always be "local".

Method 1 - You can leverage an SSO CLI utility found both in a Windows vCenter Server as well as the VCSA to query for this information.

Windows vCenter Server Utility: C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VMware\CIS\vmware-sso\ssolscli.cmd

VCSA Utility: /usr/lib/vmware-sso/bin/vi_regtool

Both commands function exactly the same but do have different paths/name. The operation that we will be using is the "listServices" and we will also need to specify the Lookup Service URL which will be in the form of https://[SSO-SERVER]:7444/lookupservice/sdk

Here is an example of using the ssolscli.cmd in vCenter Server for Windows:

In the output you should see a list of services registered and you will also be able to find the Site name in either the serviceId property which includes the Site name in the pre-fix. In the screenshot above, the Site name is "Santa Barbara". You can also find the Site name by looking at viSite property for each service and based on the URL, you will see the IP Address/Hostname in which the Site name is associated with.

Method 2 - You can also find the Site name for a given SSO Server by logging into the vSphere Web Client and under the advanced vCenter Server settings, you can filter on config.vpxd.sso string and look for the serviceId property which will include the Site name. You can also find this same information by looking at the vCenter Server configuration file (vpxd.conf) but if you have access to the vSphere Web Client, it is a much quicker way as seen in the screenshot below.

More from my site

  • How to verify SSO Multi-Master Replication is properly configured & working?
  • Hybrid environment leveraging SSO Multi-Master Replication between vCenter Server for Windows & VCSA
  • Dude, Where's My vCenter Server 5.1 Components Installed At?
  • Will I get Photon OS when I upgrade my VCSA 5.5/6.0 to VCSA 6.5?
  • How to automatically repoint & failover VCSA to another replicated Platform Services Controller (PSC)?

Categories // VCSA, vSphere Tags // sso, ssocli, ssolscli, vcsa, vcva, vi_regtool, vSphere 5.5

Comments

  1. Mike Schwartz says

    01/02/2014 at 10:41 am

    Thanks for this beneficial blog.Creating your own SSO server site name will be now easy from this discussion.The installation will be carried upon with proper steps and during these process you can create your own SSO server name for your site.

    Regards Mike

    Reply
  2. Julian Engel says

    06/17/2014 at 10:43 pm

    Thank you so much. I was having a really hard time finding this name for an upgrade. However, my site-name showed up as {21D62705-F8F5-43EF-B46C-6185D19C078D} which was pretty strange. I simply gave it a new site-name and hopefully that will work.

    Reply
  3. ravitandukar says

    05/14/2015 at 4:45 am

    Can you change the SSO server IP address?

    Reply
  4. gladalex87 says

    07/08/2015 at 9:56 am

    Hi thanks for your post, if I want to remove an installation of a sitename corrupt , how con I do? in vSphere 5.5?

    Reply
    • PM says

      09/08/2015 at 4:50 pm

      +1 here, how can we remove a dead vcenter from sso

      Reply
      • William Lam says

        09/08/2015 at 6:49 pm

        Here's how to decommission either a PSC or VC node in vSphere 6.0 kb.vmware.com/kb/2106736

        Reply
  5. Francesco says

    11/09/2016 at 5:44 am

    Hi,

    thank you for your article. I would like to ask you what is the goal of these two settings: SSO Domain and Site Name.

    I think that the first is useful for replication goals; the second is only a string to identify a site.

    These doubts are because I want to clarify what happens if I configure two SSOs, with different/same valuse of SSO Domain and/or Sitename.

    Thank you!

    Francesco

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      11/09/2016 at 6:37 am

      Please have a look at the PSC FAQ for your answer https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2113115

      In the upcoming vSphere 6.5 release, Sites will be more important for features like the new vCenter Server High Availability (VCA)

      Reply
      • Francesco says

        11/09/2016 at 6:43 am

        Hi William,

        thank you very much for your link.

        Francesco

        Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Hybrid environment leveraging SSO Multi-Master Replication between vCenter Server for Windows & VCSA | virtuallyGhetto says:
    04/02/2014 at 2:56 am

    […] /* */ The SSO Site name can be identified by following the instructions found here. In addition to the above mandatory variables, there are a couple other variables that will […]

    Reply
  2. Migrated to #vSphere 6.5 into an unsupported #SSO topology? – This is how we got out of it! #vExpert – The Fluffy Admin says:
    06/11/2018 at 5:32 am

    […] We ourselves, did not have the wherewithal to manually check the SSO config prior to migration. We simply assumed that because we didn't see Linked mode, that the installs where separate on all levels.  If we had been more careful, we could have used the ssolscli.cmd tool to check the current SSO config. This is detailed on William Lam's blog here […]

    Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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