I got finally my head around installing vCenter Appliance 6. What an adventure… Everyone who has previously installed a vCenter Appliance is used to some easy and quick process via an OVA file. A quote from VMware about vSphere 6

With more than 650 new features and innovations, VMware vSphere 6 will provide customers with a highly available, resilient, on-demand cloud infrastructure to run, protect and manage any application. – See more at: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed/Introducing-VMware-vSphere-6—The-Foundation-for-Hybrid-Cloud/1920294#sthash.nM9LvQcJ.dpuf

650 new features and innovations? Sounds promising and you would expect things to work even easier and better than before. There are certainly some promising features but also some not so promising ones. In the case of vCenter 6, I’m not sure what happened.

So what has changed about vCenter 6? I would say almost everything, at least in regards to the install:

• No OVA
• No port 5480 admin page anymore
• Requires a Windows system to deploy the vCenter VCA 6 which is Linux based. How ironic, right?
• The installation is split in two parts
  • VMware Client-Integration Plugin
  • vCenter Server Appliance

Just the fact that I need to have a Windows system to deploy a Linux based VM sounds and feels wrong.
Since the setup isn’t straight forward anymore, below are the steps to get started:

1. Login to www.myvmware.com and download the vCenter 6 ISO.
   
2. Connect the ISO to a Windows VM or use a tool like DEAMON Tools to connect the ISO to your local Windows system.
3. Navigate to the VCSA folder on the ISO and run VMware-ClientIntegrationPlugin-6.0.0.
4. Open vca-setup.html, located in root directory of the ISO and start the installation.
   
5. Specify the ESXi where you want to run the vCenter Appliance Server on.
6. Specify a VM name and the OS password for the vCSA 6
7. With vCenter 6, VMware introduced the Platform Service Controller which is required for every vCenter 6 instance. Multiple vCenter instances can share the same Platform Service Controller. The Platform Service Controller is used so share services like Single-Sign-On between multiple vCenters.Note: In this example, I’ll use the embedded Platform Service Controller within the vCenter Server Appliance.
   
8. Select whether you want to join an existing SSO domain or create a new one. I have chosen to create a new one.
9. Select the size of your vCenter Server instance.
   Tiny – 10 hosts & 100 VMs
   Small – 100 hosts & 1000 VMs
   Medium – 400 hosts & 4000 VMs
   Large – 1000 hosts & 10,000 VMs
   
10. Chose the datastore where you want to place your vCenter Service Appliance on and select “Enable Thin Disk Mode” to make the disk thin provisioned.
11. Select if you want to use the embedded vPostgres or use an external Oracle DB.
12. Next, configure the network settings.
13. Review the summary of your configuration and click Finish.

 

Once you clicked Finish, the actual installation will start.
The deployment and startup of the appliance will take roughly 10-15 minutes.

 

 

 

After the appliance is started you can login through either the vSphere Web-Client or the Windows Client with your SSO credentials. Make sure to login as administrator@ and not as root.