lookupservice

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 4: Finding all deployed vCenter Servers

04.16.2015 by William Lam // 2 Comments

In vSphere 6.0, there are a list of recommended topologies which can viewed in VMware KB 2108548. In the event that you need to locate all available vCenter Servers in your environment, you have a couple of options depending on type of access you have and the state of your environment (e.g. vSphere Web Client is down). For locating all deployed Platform Service Controllers (PSC), please take a look at my previous article here. Before taking a look at the solutions, here is a diagram of my vSphere 6.0 lab environment and its configuration: 2 PSCs configured for replication with 2 VCs joined to PSC1 and another VC joined to PSC2.

Option 1:

The first option to find this information is using the new System Configuration UI which is available in the vSphere 6.0 Web Client. You can quickly view all Nodes and their type as seen in the screenshot below. This would be the quickest and most efficient method if access to the vSphere Web Client is available.

Option 2:

We can also connect to a new service in vSphere 6.0 known as the Component Manager via its MOB (Managed Object Browser) interface. You will need to open a browser and connect to the following URL and substituting it with the Hostname/IP Address of one of your PSC:

https://psc-01.primp-industries.com/cm/mob/?moid=ServiceManager&method=Search

If you do not know the Hostname/IP Address of your PSC Server, you can always find it by going to the vCenter Server Advanced Settings and searching for pattern "sso.admin" and you will see the address of your PSC Server as seen in the screenshot below.

Once you have authenticated in, you will need to add the following snippet into the text box:

<searchCriteria>
<serviceType>
<productId>com.vmware.cis</productId>
<typeId>vcenterserver</typeId>
</serviceType>
</searchCriteria>

Note: For programmatic access, please refer to Option 3 for more details.

Next, click on Invoke Method to execute the query and if everything was successful, you should see entries under "serviceAttributes" for all your vCenter Servers as seen in the screenshot below.

Option 3:

The final option is to of course retrieve this information programmatically using the new vCloud Suite SDK which is part of the vSphere 6.0 release. There are 6 new SDKs: .Net, Java, Perl, REST, Python & Ruby and you can find more information here. In this example, I will be using the vCloud Suite SDK for Python and using the sample located under the "lookupservice" directory called print_services.py You will need to download and extract the contents of the SDK onto a system that has a Python interpreter installed and below are the instructions for running this particular sample script.

First, you will need to edit a configuration file and provide some details to one of your PSC's

VMware-vCloud-Suite-SDK-Python-6.0.0/client/samples/src/sample.cfg

Here is an example of what the file should look like for my environment:

[connection]
lswsdlurl=file:///root/VMware-vCloud-Suite-SDK-Python-6.0.0/client/wsdl/lookupservice.wsdl
lssoapurl=https://psc-01.primp-industries.com/lookupservice/sdk
ssousername=*protected email*
ssopassword=VMware1!

Next, change into the following directory:

cd VMware-vCloud-Suite-SDK-Python-6.0.0/client/bin/

Finally, to run the sample script you will need to ensure run_sample.sh (wrapper script) is set to executable and then run the following:

./run_sample.sh ../samples/src/com/vmware/vcloud/suite/sample/lookupservice/print_services.py

If everything was configured successfully, you should see similar output as shown in the screenshot below:

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 3: Finding all deployed Platform Services Controller

04.08.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

In vSphere 6.0, there are a list of recommended topologies which can viewed in VMware KB 2108548. In the event that you need to locate all available Platform Services Controllers in your environment, you have a couple of options depending on type of access you have and the state of your environment (e.g. vSphere Web Client is down). Before taking a look at the solutions, here is a diagram of my vSphere 6.0 lab environment and its configuration: 2 PSCs configured for replication with 2 VCs joined to PSC1 and another VC joined to PSC2.

Option 1:

Option 2:

https://psc-01.primp-industries.com/cm/mob/?moid=ServiceManager&method=Search

Once you have authenticated in, you will need to add the following snippet into the text box:

<searchCriteria>
<serviceType>
<productId>com.vmware.cis</productId>
<typeId>sso:admin</typeId>
</serviceType>
</searchCriteria>

Note: For programmatic access, please refer to Option 3 for more details.

Next, click on Invoke Method to execute the query and if everything was successful, you should see entries under "serviceEndpoints" for all your PSCs as seen in the screenshot below.

Option 3:

First, you will need to edit a configuration file and provide some details to one of your PSC's

VMware-vCloud-Suite-SDK-Python-6.0.0/client/samples/src/sample.cfg

Here is an example of what the file should look like for my environment:

Next, change into the following directory:

cd VMware-vCloud-Suite-SDK-Python-6.0.0/client/bin/

Finally, to run the sample script you will need to ensure run_sample.sh (wrapper script) is set to executable and then run the following:

./run_sample.sh ../samples/src/com/vmware/vcloud/suite/sample/lookupservice/print_services.py

If everything was configured successfully, you should see similar output as shown in the screenshot below:

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 2: What is my SSO Domain Name & Site Name?

04.07.2015 by William Lam // 27 Comments

When deploying an Embedded vCenter Server or an external Platform Services Controller, one of the configurations you will be asked for is the vCenter Single Sign-On Domain Name and Site Name as seen in the screenshot below.

In addition to troubleshooting, you will also need to know about the SSO Domain Name + Site Name if you plan on deploying additional Platform Services Controller for replication purposes or additional vCenter Servers. It is important to note that you do not need to know this information explicitly when deploying using the new Guided UI Installation. You just need to know the hostname/IP Address of your PSC as the rest of the information will automatically be obtained by the tool.

The issue only arises when you are trying to perform a Scripted Installation and this is where you will need to provide both the SSO Domain Name and Site Name and below are the instructions on retrieving this information.

First off, you will need to login to your Platform Services Controller whether that be on a Windows Server or the VCSA.

SSO Domain Name

You will find it in the following two configuration files:

Windows:

C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\cfg\install-defaults\vmdir.domain-name

VCSA:

/etc/vmware/install-defaults/vmdir.domain-name

VCSA 6.0u2:

/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli get-domain-name --server-name localhost

For more details, check out my previous blog post: vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 1: What install & deployment parameters did I use?

SSO Site Name

First, you will need to identify where your Lookup Service is running on which is located on your PSC or your Embedded VC instance. What we are ultimately looking for is Lookup Service URL which is in the following format: https://[SERVER]/lookupservice/sdk If for whatever reason you do not know where your PSC is, then you can login to your vCenter Server and find the Lookup Service URL by running the following command:

Windows:

"C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\vmafdd\vmafd-cli.exe" get-ls-location --server-name localhost

VCSA:

/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli get-ls-location --server-name localhost

Once we have the Lookup Service URL, we can then find the SSO Site Name by running the following command:

Windows:

"C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\python\python.exe" "C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\VMware Identity Services\lstool\scripts\lstool.py" get-site-id --url https://vcenter60-6.primp-industries.com/lookupservice/sdk"

VCSA:

/usr/lib/vmidentity/tools/scripts/lstool.py get-site-id --url https://vcenter60-6.primp-industries.com/lookupservice/sdk 2> /dev/null

VCSA 6.0u2:

/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli get-site-name --server-name localhost

As you can see the process to find the SSO Site Name is not really intuitive, but I know Engineering is aware of this and has plans to simplify this in the future.