vCenter

Hello,

I am having trouble wrapping my head around setting the SSO domain during my new vSphere 6.0 deployment. I have an active directory domain (domain.local) and during the vCenter 6 install you are asked for the SSO domain name (default is vsphere.local). What I want to know is how important is this name and what is the impact of choosing or changing the name from default? The reason for my questions is as follows:

1. We have an vSphere/vCenter 5.5 deployment for our domain and application infrastructure that used vsphere.local as the SSO domain.

2. I am deploying a new vSphere/vCenter 6.0 environment for a new VDI environment.

3. I will be deploying a second vSphere/vCenter 6.0 environment for a second VDI environment.

4. I will not be using linked more between the two vCenter 6 environment as I want to keep them totally separate.

Factoring all of that in, is it safe to use vsphere.local for my first 6.0 deployment even though I am using vsphere.local for my production 5.5 environment already? If that is OK,  is it then OK to use vsphere.local for both of my vSphere 6.0 deployments even though all three environments will be authenticating against the domain.local active directory domain? Does the SSO domain write anything to AD or does it just authenticate against it so that I can use the same SSO domain across all three separate environments without any negative impact?

Any help with sort out my confusion with this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Yes, it is safe to use the same SSO domain name for multiple vSphere deployments, even if you are using the same Active Directory domain as a identity source. Remember that before vCenter 6, you're not able to change the SSO domain name to anything other than vsphere.local and this never was a limit to how many vCenter Server can be deployed and configured to use the same Active Directory domain.