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MSchaff
Contributor
Contributor

How to add child vCenter to manage subset of hosts

Hello,

I have a single VCSA 6.7 appliance managing hosts in two small data centers.  Each data center has two small clusters in it, with workloads split between the two clusters.  Cluster A in data center 1 has similar workloads to cluster A in data center 2, and cluster B in data center 1 has similar workloads to cluster B in data center 2.

I'd like to add a "child" vCenter appliance to this configuration, so that the child vCenter server will only have visibility of the hosts in cluster B of the two data centers.  Ideally, the existing vCenter server would retain its visibility of all the hosts, but it that isn't directly possible, it could do so via it's "parent" relationship of the new "child" vCenter server.  Another option would be for the new vCenter server to become a parent of the existing server.  Either direction is acceptable to me.

I'm a little hazy on how to go about this process, specifically with regards to the PSC.  I'm not clear on how to add a new vCenter to the configuration, either as a parent or a child, and how to integrate the two without having to rebuild the existing distributed switches and other settings currently in place.

If there are any resources available that describe how to deploy a configuration like this, I'd be grateful for any pointers to them.  Thanks in advance!

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

This is what you need: vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode

There is no such concept of parent/child though.


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MSchaff
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks Scott!

I'm in the process of deploying the second vCenter server.  When I get to the SSO Configuration step, I assume I pick the "Join an existing SSO domain" option, and am proceeding with providing the credentials of the existing vSphere.Local domain.  However, the system will not accept my existing password for the current administrator account.  A balloon pops up stating "Use A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and punctuation".  That all makes sense, but unfortunately, my existing SSO passphrase does not utilize numeric digits.

Does this requirement (which seems odd, given that I am joining an existing domain, rather than creating a new one) imply that I won't be able to join the existing domain without changing the existing administrator@vsphere.local passphrase?  That won't be the end of the world, but is an inconvenient step.

Thanks for any help on this!

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