Adding a vCenter Server instance

Before we start managing our virtual infrastructure, we need to add the components to VCM. We will start adding them in the following recipes, starting with vCenter.

Getting ready

We will need a user with administrative access to the vCenter instance that we want to add to VCM as well as its fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or IP address.

How to do it...

To add the vCenter instance to VCM, log in to the VCM server UI and follow these steps:

1. Log in to VCM with an administrative account.
2. Go to Administration | Machines Manager | Licensed Machines | Licensed Virtual Environments.
   
3. Click on Add Machines.
4. Select Basic on the first page of the wizard.
5. Enter the hostname (not FQDN here) for the machine name, select Domain from the dropdown which the machine belongs to, select DNS for Type, and vCenter Windows for Machine Type.
6. Click on Add, and then click on Next.
7. Click on Finish to close the wizard.

   Note

   With these steps, we added the vCenter instance to VCM, but we still need to configure it so that we can collect the details.

8. Now, select the vCenter instance we just added and click on Configure Settings.
9. In this wizard, select the vCenter instance.
10. Provide the following information:
    • Managing Agent: Your Collector server
    • Port: 443
    • User ID: A user with administrative access to vCenter
    • Password: The password for the user; enter it twice to confirm
    • Ignore untrusted SSL Certificate: Yes
11. Click on Next once all the details have been filled in.
    

    Note

    Note: The user must have a vCenter Server administrative role or a read-only role. However, you cannot run actions with a read-only role.

12. Click on Finish to close the wizard.
13. There should be a green circle in front of the vCenter instance's name on the VCM console.

How it works...

We are adding vCenter to VCM so that we can collect information about all the ESXi hosts in the instance, all the virtual machines, and so on, and based on this information, we can create compliance checks for our virtual infrastructure, discover the virtual machines as managed machines in VCM so that we can install agents, and collect information about them as well.

VCM collects the following information from vCenter:

• vCenter Summary
• vCenter Custom Information
• vCenter Guests
• vCenter Hosts
• vCenter Host Profiles
• vCenter Inventory
• vCenter Networking
• vCenter Settings
• vCenter Resource Pools
• vCenter Roles