Once vCD has imported and the welcome options dealt with (EULA, Licensing and so on), you will be able to login to vCloud Director proper. The default user name is admin and default with the virtual appliance version, but you can easily change this under the “Administration” tab, and the Users node.
As with a great many products from VMware now there’s a step-by-step wizard that will take you through the main configuration, and these “light” up as each step is completed.
So my first task was to make vCloud Director aware of my vSphere environment, by adding in my vCenter system. That’s where I hit my first change in vCloud Director 5.1. With the release of vSphere5.1 we now have new “single sign on” (SSO) service. That enables the ability to use your directory service credentials to logon via the SSO service to another service that is registered with it. That was something I hadn’t done with vCloud Director yet.
As you can see vCD 5.1 is fully-aware of new web client that shipped as part of vSphere5.1. You have two options on how to make vCD aware of the Web Client URL either by using the lookup service (which lists all the service registered with SSO) or by just manually typing the URL. Quick google of the phrase “Configure vCloud Director to use vCenter Single Sign On” took me to the online documentation. The configuration to register vCD with the Lookup Service for SSO is located under the “Administration” tab and “Federation”. There’s a small button that allows you to register vCD with SSO. In my simple configuration using the vCenter Server Appliance – the vCenter/SSO/Web Client all reside on the same instance, but remember it is possible to split the services out into a more dedicated configuration.
You need to be a little bit careful at this point. It’s important not to log out of vCD, before first including a “domain” account from the directory service that you configured with SSO – in my case this is the “corp” domain. The next step is to “import” accounts from the directory service (in my case the Corp domain hosted with Active Directory) into vCD and to make sure that account has rights.
The alternative is not to use the SSO service, and instead manually specify the vCenter/Web Client in the UI – of course whatever method you use to communicate to vCenter – you will also need to supply the IP/FQDN of the vShield Manager that is part of the vCenter instance.
Once you’ve completed this task you will find that “Attach vCenter” on the “Home” page becomes “Attach another vCenter”. Additionally, you should also see it in the “Manage & Monitor” tab, under > vSphere Resources, >vCenters. Of course, you can add additional vCenter here as well. I noticed two things here – first the right-click option to open the Web Client on the vCenter5.1 appliance, and also that the vShield Manager IP address is exposed. In fact despite specifying the vShield by FQDN, the edit dialog box shows not the name but the FQDN.
Once you have vCenter listed in vCloud Director you should see it appears as a solution in >vCenter Solutions Manager >Extension Types:
