Access vCenter through public IP-Address

[ProjectD22]

Hi there!

I just deployed the vCenter Appliance. Now I want to connect from anywhere to it. The problem is I can't use a VPN connection to do so.

So I tried to use port forwarding instead. I now it isn't the most secure way to do so but it's just for demonstration and has no productive use or even confidential data on it.

When I connect to vCenter using my public IP I'm getting to the "first steps" page. When I click on the link which should bring me to the vSphere Web Client it'll try to connect to the local IP which isn't right because I will do this on another network.

Is it somehow possible to change the IP it tries to connect to?

Thank you in advance!

[TOM_CFFP · Accepted solution]

So the links in the "Getting Started" section I believe are dynamically created based on either the host name or the IP assigned to vcenter when you installed it.  They assume you are accessing it from only the management lan.  You can change the property under the vcenter -> configure -> setting -> advanced settings.  Property: config.vpxd.hostnameUrl

That may break things accessing it locally though.  One solution, if you have an internal dns server, give the internal IP the same host name as whatever domain name you may have pointed to the external ip.

Thats probably the only way to do it, because the javascript in the HTML5 that calls the REST service also appears to use the config.vpxd.hostnameUrl.   So even if you manually typed in https://<IP>/ui,   everything else will break.