AD authentication and Windows Passthrough VCSA appliance
While we are deploying a new vCenter 6.0 environment we planned to make a setup like this:
2 physical sites, on both sites we create a vCenter appliance and a vCenter Platform Service controller. Both the PSC are joined to the same (replication) domain.
Deployment worked perfect, logged in as SSO user, and configured the LDAP settings so we could login with our domain accounts.
Wow easy as hell, but hey a colleague mentions he cannot login while using the checkbox “use windows credentials”. We got an error
Problem:
You see a popup with the error:
Window session credentials cannot be used to log into this server. Enter a user name and password
Troubleshooting:
Well I tried a lot of VMware KB’s like :
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2050701
And also a few others but still with no real result.
Then I found out on a few different sites you need to join the appliances to your Active Directory Domain. That makes sense, searched for some guides and you can do it by GUI but then only for the PSC’s this didn’t solve the problem.
For testing I started to deployed an embedded VCSA and configured that the way I did with external version. Joined the machine to the domain, tested this and wow that worked.
So somewhere in the communication flow between VC – PSC – AD something will go wrong. The AD connection should be good as it worked flawless with the embedded version (assumption) so the problem should be something between VC and PSC.
I remembered a note on a site to join ALL nodes from your vSphere environment to AD to make it work. But damn, why does the GUI only show the PSC’s ? Makes sense that only the PSC are connected to a domain and do the authentication.
A colleague then tied the knots and a found a command to join AD from command line. Hey I already saw it, but what if we also look on the vCenter server to see if we can join them too.
Wow the command is there.
/opt/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli
So let’s try again :
- Re-deploy 2 VC’s and 2 PSC
- Login with SSH
- Join PSC’s to domain, join VC’s to domain
-
/opt/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli join <domain><domain admin user>
- Restart all servers
- Login with SSH
- Query DC to see if the join was succesfull
/opt/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli query
- Configure SSO
- Test …….BAM works!
Solution:
Join all nodes (vCenter servers & Platform Service Controllers) to the Active Directory Domain.
/opt/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli join <domain><domain admin user>
Bonus : For troubleshooting I checked a lot of log files, here is a good list of log file locations: