vSphere 6.0 – Page 9

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool officially GAs w/vSphere 6.0 Update 2m

09.15.2016 by William Lam // 45 Comments

Today, I am very happy to announce that we have released the official Windows vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool which is part of the new VCSA vSphere 6.0 Update 2m release! I know many of you have been asking for an update since we released the VCS to VCSA Convert Appliance Fling a little over a year ago. The Fling was pretty limited in functionality and this was by design so that we could quickly get something out to our customers and get some early feedback. Although I could not say anything, the VMware Engineering team have been very hard at work incorporating all of the feedback in how they designed and built the official VCSA Migration Tool that you see today.

With that, I would like to extend a huge thanks to all of our customers who took part in the Fling and provided feedback both in the comments section as well as reaching out to me through the various channels. It was great to engage with literally hundreds of customers of all sizes and segments, all looking to move away from a Windows-based vCenter Server to the VCSA. Lastly, I want to thank our VMware Engineering team, both to the folks who lead the initial effort on the Fling prototype to those who then productized it! I was very fortunate to have been part of this amazing milestone at VMware.

The VCSA Migration Tool workflow is quite different from how the Fling had worked which hopefully customers will appreciate. The team worked really hard on trying to simplify the overall user experience as well as trying to minimize the overall amount of downtime for the migration. In addition, we have also added full support for additional configurations and deployment topologies which you can find more details in the resource link below which includes an FAQ which I *highly* recommend folks have a look at before starting or asking further questions.

Collection of all #migrate2vcsa Links / Resources: vmwa.re/migrate2vcsalinks

Here is a quick video that I had recorded earlier which demonstrates a migration from a Windows vSphere 5.5 environment to VCSA 6.0 Update 2m, hopefully this will give you a nice overview of the migration process.

[UI Demo] - Migration of Windows vCenter Server 5.5 to vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 Update 2m from lamw on Vimeo.

One last thing I want to quickly mention is that this release is specifically targeted at customers looking to migrate from a Windows vCenter Server 5.5 to the VCSA 6.0 Update 2, hence the letter "m" denotation. If you are NOT looking to migrate your Windows vCenter Server to the VCSA, this release is NOT applicable to you as you will NOT be able to perform a new install and/or upgrade using this release. Instead, you should be looking at the vSphere 6.0 Update 2 release which is the exact same code base that vSphere 6.0 Update 2m is based off of. This will be even more apparent when you launch the VCSA Installer, as the "Migrate" button is the only option as shown in the screenshot below.

For those planning to attend VMworld this year, we do plan to have several sessions covering the new VCSA Migration Tool as well as some other surprises 🙂 I hope to see you there and if you have any comments or feedback, feel free to leave it here or use the #migrate2vcsa hashtag if you are on Twitter, especially if you are interested in some of the surprises at VMworld.

Automating the import of vCenter Server 6.x root certificate

07.27.2016 by William Lam // 14 Comments

In vSphere 6.0, you can now easily import your vCenter Server's trusted root CA certificate onto your client desktop by simply downloading it from the vCenter Server's landing page as shown in the screenshot below. Michael White had also recently wrote about this topic here which includes a step by step walk through.

Several weeks back I was working on an internal project which required the vCenter Server's root certificate. I was already aware of this interface and had written a quick and dirty script to automate the process of downloading and importing the certificate to the system I was working on. To be honest, I did not think much of the script after I wrote it. It was just recently that Alan Renouf, who was also involved in the project mentioned that it might be worth sharing the script as others might also find it useful. I thought that was a good idea and re-factored the code a bit since it was being used in a slightly different context. While doing so, I also created an equivalent PowerShell sample since the original script was meant to run on either a Mac OS X or Linux platform.

With that, I have created a simple shell script called import-vcrootcertificate.sh which can run on either Mac OS X or Linux system and a PowerShell script called Import-VCRootCertificate.ps1

Both scripts are pretty easy to use, they accept a single command-line argument which is the Hostname/IP Address of the vCenter Server that you wish to import the root certificate from. Both scripts ere able to detect if the vCenter Server is Windows or the VCSA since they have a slightly different URL to the root certificate before performing the import. Since the script will need access to your certificate store, you will need to run the scripts using a privileged account.

Here is a screenshot of running the PowerShell script:

Here is a screenshot of running the shell script:

Quick Tip - How to disable the landing page for vCenter Server 5.x & 6.x?

07.25.2016 by William Lam // 2 Comments

The question of wanting to disable the default landing page for the vCenter Server is one that comes up infrequently. In fact, I probably see this maybe once or twice a year. However, when it does come up, it usually revolves around two topics: some sort of security risk and limiting users from obtaining software provided through these landing pages. In both case, simply disabling these landing pages will not solve either of these perceived issues.

I generally find these landing pages quite useful as they provide links to software downloads such as our legacy vSphere C# Client, SDK documentation as well as links to other interfaces to vCenter Server like the vSphere Web Client login, the datastore browser or the vSphere MOB. All of this information can be obtained through other official channels, so simply disabling this page does not really prevent users from downloading this content or accessing these interfaces.

On the second topic around security (which by no means am I an expert in), some customers feel that simply removing these default landing pages would some how prevent a security risk because a version of the software is no longer listed on that page? This is what some folks would call security through obscurity which just does not work. There are many different ways of identifying a version of vCenter Server and some of its components as well checking if the service is running. Simply removing these pages does little to nothing from stopping someone from retrieving this information using other methods. Instead, users should really be focusing how they are implementing security both in the software as well as the policies and processes they have in place which hopefully are inline with modern security practices.

In fact, by disabling some of these pages, you might even be hurting your overall customer experience depending on their familiarity with vCenter Server.

In any case, for those that are still inclined to disable these pages, below are the instructions on how to disable the various landing pages as I have not really seen this documented anywhere. The solution is actually quite simple which is to just rename the index files to something else which will prevent them from being loaded by the webserver.

Landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Tomcat landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\ROOT\index.jsp
VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/tomcat/webapps/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/index.jsp

Landing page for vCenter Server 6.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Landing page for Platform Services Controll (vSphere 6.x)

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\WEB-INF\views\index.jsp
VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/WEB-INF/views/index.jsp

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