Migrating Embedded vCenter Server Appliance to an External Platform Service Controller

In my test lab I have deployed VMware vCenter Appliance (VCSA) 6.0 with an embedded Platform Service Controller and I wanted to reconfigure this with an external Platform Service Controller. At the initial stage I was doubt about this and I started to checking the possibilities of change the configuration.

I had a question and I wanted to know whether there is a way to find the pointed Platform Service Controller in my vCenter. There are two ways that you can find the pointed Platform Service Controller.

I logged in to the vCenter and checked the config.vpxd.sso.admin.uri advanced vCenter parameter and we can easily find the pointed Platform Service Controller

Also, we can find this in the bash shell. If we are redirecting to the Appliance shell we need to change this to the bash shell. Follow this post to change the Appliance shell to bash shell. Use the below commands to check the pointed Platform Service Controllers.

For VCSA :

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

For Windows based vCenter server :

C:Program FilesVMwarevCenter Servervmafddvmafd-cli get-ls-location --server-name localhost

So in this way we can verify the pointed Platform Service Controller and we are going to reconfigure and re-point our vCenter server to an External Platform Service Controller.

First of all I have deployed another Appliance as an Platform Service Controller

Joined to the same SSO domain and provided the FQDN of the current Platform Service Controller (in this case it’s vCenter server) and the SSO administrator password for the authentication

Joined to the existing site

Completed the Deployment

Here we use cmsso-util to change the configuration and used -h to get the help of the command, we can see the available commands with this -h switch

I checked the cmsso-util repoint -h to available options

If we try to repoint the embedded PSC we can see the below message, as I mentioned earlier we can’t use repoint option to change the embedded PSC, we have to use reconfigure option

We can check the same way to get the available commands

Used cmsso-util reconfigure –repoint-psc <PSC_NODE_FQDN> –username <username_of_the_sso> –domain-name <domain_name> –passwd <password_of_the_sso_admin> to point the external PSC

Here is my command and it took sometime to do the configurations

All after that checked the new PSC

That’s all it was pointed to the new external PSC.