vMA - Managing the Hosts

After our ESXi 4.1 Hosts were deployed we didn't have a way of centrally managing the console so we installed the vMA to provide this.

I've configured the vMA as per the guide (skipping out the Configure Unattended Authentication for Active Directory Targets - which we thought, could be wrong, dealing with vilogger.... which we aren't using)

Requirements

Wanted to use AD authentication so we could see who was accessing the boxes via Syslog entries in SCOM 2007 (snmp and Host configuration to log to SCOM is convered in another, suitably titled, blog).
The main point is to be able to use the vMA as it was designed to be the console replacement.

vMA Configuration

1. Joined the domain - sudo domainjoin-cli join <domain-name> <domain-admin-user> (reboot vMA)
2. Check the status of the domain join - sudo domainjoin-cli query
3. Add vCenter server - vifp addserver <vc-host-name> --authpolicy adauth --username <domain>\\<domain account>
4. Add the Hosts - vifp addserver <esxi-host-name> --authpolicy adauth
5. Check all servers are listed, including vCenter - vifp listservers (if you add --long at the end it will show what type of authentication is used adauth or fpauth)

All setup to do some querying....

E.g. wanted to have a look at the MAC address as the NIC
1. Set target for vi-fastpass pointing at your vCenter - vifptarget -s <vc-host-name>
2. Look for NIC information of Host 1 - vicfg-nics -l --vihost <Host 1>

A useful output will appear showing you that Hosts NIC information (which is quite useful when the Network Team wants MAC address information to do some troubleshooting!)

Tidying up (removing Hosts etc)

1. Remove Host/vCenter - vifp removeserver <host-name>
2. Change authentication policy - vifp reconfigure <host-name> --authpolicy <adauth or fpauth>