How To Add VMware vCenter to Virtual Machine Manager 2012

pennate

　　It appears that you enjoy the articles I write on Microsoft Hyper-V  and Virtual Machine Manager, as evidenced by the fact that these  articles rank highly among the "Most Viewed Articles" listed on this  site. While I am doing my best to balance between Hyper-V, vSphere and  XenServer from a hypervisor perspective, I will continue to give you  some Hyper-V articles before swinging back to vSphere and XenServer.
　　This time, let's look at how to add VMware vCenter to Microsoft  System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. As you should know, SCVMM  2012 can manage more than just a Microsoft virtual infrastructure; yes,  it can also manage VMware and Citrix. Here is how you add vCenter in  order to manage it.
　　For this integration to work, SCVMM needs to communicate with the  vSphere infrastructure via vCenter over SSL -- simple enough, right? Not  quite. By default, vCenter creates a self-signed SSL certificate for  hostname "vmware". In most vCenter installations, the name of the server  is not "vmware" and, as such, a secure HTTPS would fail. This is in  addition to the fact that the certificate was signed by an untrusted  certificate authority to begin with, as is the case with most  self-signed SSL certificates.
　　To resolve this issue, you can do one of three things. Option one  would be to purchase an SSL certificate for your vCenter from a third  party. Option two, you can self-sign a certificate from your enterprise  certificate authority. Option three is trusting the existing SSL  certificate. To do that, just follow these steps:

• Log on to your VMM server as a local administrator, open Internet Explorer and navigate to https://vCenterServer/.
  
• If you are not logged in as local administrator or a user  with sufficient permissions, it is very important that you click  Shift+Right-Click on the Internet Explorer icon, and run it as an  Administrator. Then, navigate to https://vCenterServer/.
  
• You will get a warning screen that the SSL Certificate is not trusted, select "Continue to this web site (not recommended)".
  
• Click the Certificate error in the Security Status bar and select View Certificate.
  
• Click Install Certificate.
  
• When the Certificate Import Wizard launches, select "Place All Certificates in the following store" and click Browse.
  
• When the Select Certificate Store window comes up, make sure you select the check box for Show physical stores.
  
• Find and expand Trusted People, select Local Computer and click OK.
  
• It is important to note that if you don't see the Local Computer  option under trusted People, you are not logged in with a user that has  sufficient rights, therefore, you must run Internet Explorer as an  Administrator.
  
• Click Finish to complete the certificate import process.
  
• Click OK when you receive the import successful window.
  
• Close your browser, reopen it, and browse to your vCenter server.  The browser should now trust your vCenter server and therefore you  should not receive a certificate error. That is how you can verify if  the process was successful.
  

　　Now that the certificate is installed, you can proceed to adding vCenter to VMM:

• Open the Fabric workspace, expand the Servers node and click Add vCenter Servers.
  
• Click Add Resources from the Home tab and click VMware vCenter Servers.
  
• The Add wizard starts, enter the FQDN, NetBios or IP of the vCenter server.
  
• Select the Run As active directory account which has administrative rights on the vCenter server and click OK.
  
• In the security area there is a check box next to Communicate with  VMware ESX hosts in secure mode. By default, VMM recommends that you  establish an SSL connection with the ESX hosts. This means that in  addition to the vCenter certificate, you need to also resolve the ESX  hosts SSL certificates so that they are trusted. If you choose to simply  rely on the Run As account, you can uncheck this box.
  
• Click OK.
  

　　You should know that System Center 2012 SP1 supports vCenter 4.1 and  5.0, but depending on when you are reading this article, you should  research whether your version of VMware vCenter is supported in order to  avoid any issues.