vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) is the authentication backbone of the vSphere platform. It handles login to vCenter, manages identity sources, and issues tokens that vSphere services use to authenticate with each other internally. When it works, it’s invisible. When it breaks, everything breaks simultaneously and the error messages are spectacularly unhelpful. What SSO Actually Is … Read more
A failed vCenter upgrade is among the more stressful VMware events you’ll deal with. The VMs are still running, HA and DRS are still functioning on cached state, but vCenter itself is in an inconsistent state between versions and things are subtly broken in ways that compound over time. Here’s what to do. How Failed … Read more
vCenter’s role-based access control is one of those configuration areas that gets set up once during initial deployment and then rarely revisited — until someone has more access than they should, or can’t do something they need to, and tracing why requires untangling permissions that accumulated over years. How vCenter Permissions Work vCenter permissions are … Read more
Certificate issues in vSphere environments are the most reliable source of annoying, hard-to-diagnose problems I’ve encountered. They show up at upgrade time, after hardware changes, when adding new hosts, and sometimes apparently at random. Here’s what I’ve learned after dealing with these problems across multiple client environments. The VMCA and What It Does Starting with … Read more
Running standalone ESXi hosts is a common starting point for small businesses. It’s simple, cost-effective, and covers a lot of ground. But there’s a clear inflection point where standalone hosts start to limit you — and adding vCenter is the change that unlocks the rest of the platform. What You Can’t Do Without vCenter Standalone … Read more