Figured I’d upgrade my lab vCenter from 4.1 to 5.1 today.. talk about more than I expected!

First, I had to go and install the vCenter SSO functionality before I could even upgrade the vCenter inventory service.

Second, I had to upgrade the vCenter inventory service.

Third, I had to install the vCenter Web Client so I could configure SSO post install. This was a royal pain as by default, the service would not start.

I had to do the following:

1) Creat a symlink “C:\VWC” that points to the vSphere Web Client folder, which is “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphereWebClient” by default.

Run the following command:

mklink /d C:\VWC "C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphereWebClient"

2) Modify the vSphere Web Client Service Image Path and replaced all occurences of the actual directory path (that is “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphereWebClient”) by the symlink path created in step 1 (that is “C:\VWC”). The easiest way to do this is by modifying the correspondink Windows Registry value.

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\vspherewebclientsvc

3) Start thevSphere Web Client Service by running the following command:

net start vspherewebclientsvc

Only then was I able to get the WebClient service to start…

Then all I had to do was log into the web client and configure a SSO identity source. In my case I used Active Directory.

However, nothing I did worked, and I couldn’t figure it… I ended up here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2037365

Which says.. use lower case ldap in your LDAP URL :)

sigh…

Tags: Vcenter, vmware