How To Change The vCenter Server Appliance IP Address

How To Change The vCenter Server Appliance IP Address s might not be a very common task but can be really useful when you have a similar requirement with your VCSA, let’s see how we can change the vCenter Server Appliance IP Address in this post. I remember, I had issues with changing the IP Address of the later version of vCenters and I can confirm that this possible with vCenter server 6.5 and this is how I proceed with the change. I’m focusing only with the vCenter Server Appliance in this post and I hope that you are well aware that there won’t be any Windows based vCenter server with the next numbered version.

How To Identify The VMware Virtual Machine File Locks

To start this, access the vCenter Appliance Management Interface aka VAMI, with your root credentials. 

Use https://[VCENTER_SERVER_IP]:5480 to access the VAMI

Navigate to Networking -> Manage -> Expand the “Networking Interfaces” -> Edit

Change the IP Settings and save the settings with “OK” button

Reboot the vCenter Server and check the accessibility of the vCenter with the new IP address. If you can access the vCenter just try to login and check the inventory objects.

My ESXi Servers were in disconnected state as below

To change the IP address changes in the ESXi Hosts we need to manually edit the vpxa.cfg file located in the /etc/vmware/vpxa location otherwise remove the ESXi Hosts from the inventory and re-adding is required

cat /etc/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg | grep "serverIp"

Edit the vpxa.cfg file with a text editor, I used vi editor which is very common one

Find the “<serverIp>IP_ADDRESS</serverIp>” field and change to the new IP address

Verify the changes

Restart the hostd and vpxa services

Use below commands to restart the services

/etc/init.d/hostd restart

/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Once, those services restarted host will be automatically connected again to the vCenter server.

Feel free to use scripts to the bulk execution using your coding skills. I hope this helps.