Joining VCSA 6.0 Appliance to Active Directory

Now that you have built your vCenter appliance the next step is to join it to your domain so that you can attach users and groups from the domain to your vCenter SSO domain.

Steps

1) Using your web browser navigate to your vCenter URL which should be http://appliance-IP-address-or-FQDN/vsphere-client. You may receive this message below around certificates and click "Continue to this website (not recommended)" if you are happy to proceed.

 

2) Log on as administrator@your_domain_name with the password and click "Login". ("Your_domain_name" is the SSO domain name that you created when you was installing your appliance.)

3) At the "Home" navigation menu select "Administration"

4) Locate "Deployment" and select "System Configuration"

5) Select "Nodes"

6) Once you have highlighted "Nodes" you should see the Nodes that this vCenter is managing. Select the one that you wish to make changes to

7) On the right hand panel click on the "Manage" tab

 8) Click "Active Directory" and then click "Join"

9) Fill in the details of the domain using FQDN i.e. abc.local and the username/password that has the permissions to join the domain. I would leave the OU blank so that it joins the default computer OU as I can't seem to find good information from VMware on what are the acceptable format for the LDAP. I have tried the format for username in both domain\username and username@domain. For me the latter one appeared to work more often. Once you are OK with your details click "OK"

	The operation if successful will not return any information in the events to say that it is OK. You only get a message if it is unsuccessful like the message below. Another way to check is to going in to Active Directory Users and Computers and see if there is an computer account under the default Computer container   10) Under the same panel select "Actions" and select "Reboot". You have to reboot for the settings to take affect.   11) Enter the reason for a reboot and then reboot the appliance   12) After a reboot log back in to the appliance and navigate back to "Home>Administration>Deployment>System Configuration". Select "Nodes" and highlight the node we need then on the right hand panel go to "Manage > Active Directory". You should see which domain you have joined and also the "Join" button is greyed out but you have option to click "Leave" The next step on this is to start configuring SSO to use users and groups to authenticate to your vSphere environment.