While you may choose to ignore certain features of vCenter, you certainly can’t miss on this one. While i did miss on this one until today, I thought writing about it would make sense, after all.
Before we begin, re-pointing vCenter isn’t completely new as this feature was in existence in the pre-PSC era of VMware, 5.5 to be precise. In this article, I would like to brief about re-pointing a embedded vCenter server to another embedded vCenter server in a different domain (but with same domain names.i.e vsphere.local). The topology would look something like the below figure.
Let us log into the vCenter and check the replication partner status before proceeding with re-pointing.
- SSH to source vCenter Server Appliance – cd /usr/lib/vmware-vmdir/bin
- Execute the following command: ./vdcrepadmin -f showpartners -h localhost -u administrator -w VMware1!
- The output should return nothing (shown below) if your topology is the same as above.
- If there are any replication partners, you can follow this link to proceed with the re-pointing.
- If there are no replication partners, proceed with executing the command: cmsso-util domain-repoint -m execute –src-emb-admin Administrator –replication-partner-fqdn “fdqn_of_the_destination_embedded_VC” –replication-partner-admin administrator –dest-domain-name vsphere.local
- When prompted enter the source embedded VC admin password
- When prompted enter the destination embedded VC (replication partner PSC) admin password
- Verify the Re-point node information and confirm. Press Y to proceed.
- The re-pointing operation begins
- Post completion, the SSO password of the destination gets applied and both the vCenter’s are now in Enhanced linked mode making them available under single pane for management.
- Now checking the replication partner should return each other’s name as shown below.
- Post completion, your topology should look something like the below figure.
Happy learning!
