A Tour of vSphere 6.0 Update 1 Platform Service Controller UI
One of the glamorous new features of VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 1 is the new web interface for the Platform Service Controller (PSC) component of vCenter. This is VMware’s attempt at making the PSC a little more user friendly. This blog article is an exploration of this interface.
To access the PSC, you’ll need:
a web browser (because that’s the future….).
You point the browser at https://(vcenter)/psc and log in. This works regardless of whether you have an embedded vCenter solution (vCenter server and PSC on one server) or go for separate servers, though obviously the URL is a little different! This is what you’ll see. Pretty, isn’t it?
We can carry out some user administration and configuration – this could be done from within the vCenter itself already, and the GUI is no different. So, as before, we can set up identity sources and set up policies.
The new element is the Certificates section which provides some tools to aid managing the VMCA – the built in Certificate Authority.
If you’re replacing the certificates with proper signed certificates to make it an intermediate certificate authority (which is better than leaving it at the default), you can replace the Root Certificate for the vCenter Certificate Authority by going through Certificate Authority> Root Certificate. You’ll still need to go through the process of creating a CSR and editing the certificate, as would have been the case in the old process anyway. (Take a look at the VMware vSphere 6 documentation for this.).
After this, you renew the machine certificate for vCenter by going to Certificate Management>Machine Certificates and selecting the __Machine_Cert and hitting Renew.
If you’ve got any solutions installed, the Solution User Certificates tab can be used to renew these also.
By managing certificates on the PSC before adding any other components, you don’t need to change anything else – the PSC will issue trusted certificates to requesting components from here on out.
Finally, there’s a section called Appliance Settings. Obviously, this is focused on the vCenter appliance and provides both administration for Active Directory domain membership…..
… and access to the link to the actual Appliance settings interface, accessible separately at https://(vCenter Appliance):5480/login.html.
So, overall, a useful feature and a big improvement on the initial release.
Curtis Brown joined the Xtravirt consulting team in October 2012. With over 16 years’ experience, Curtis has worked in both private and public sectors on a wide variety of projects including many solutions for server consolidation and VDI, implementation and migration, data centre transformations and virtualisation programmes.
In 2015, Curtis achieved the VMware vExpert award.
Twitter: @curtisbrown01
If you’d like any assistance with a virtualisation project or simply want to learn more about how Xtravirt can help your organisation, please contact us, and we’d be more than happy to use our real world experiences to support you.
