Lab, VMware, vSphere

Deploy vSphere 6.5 Platform Services Controller – PSC

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The purpose of this document is to go through the installation of the Platform Services Controller PSC version 6.5, as part 1 of the vCenter Server (Appliance) deployment with an external PSC.

vCenter Server and the vCenter Server components are deployed on one system, and the services included in the Platform Services Controller are deployed on another system.

The following components are included in the vCenter Server and vCenter Server Appliance installations:

  • The VMware Platform Services Controller group of infrastructure services contains vCenter Single Sign-On, License service, Lookup Service, and VMware Certificate Authority.
  • The vCenter Server group of services contains vCenter Server, vSphere Web Client, vSphere Auto Deploy, and vSphere ESXi Dump Collector. vCenter Server for Windows also contains the VMware vSphere Syslog Collector. The vCenter Server Appliance also contains the VMware vSphere Update Manager Extension service.

For more information about vSphere 6.5 please refer to the official VMware vSphere documentation here.

For What is Νew in vSphere 6.5 click here.

 

Let’s start with the installation of the external PSC.

Download the VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 ISO from VMware downloads.

You will see below that the VCSA installer has changed dramatically, it’s a lot cleaner, simpler, and many deployment options (install, upgrade, migrate, restore) are bundled into the same one installer.

Let’s do it.

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VMware, vSphere

Platform Services Controller (PSC) Replication Latency – Enhanced Linked Mode

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At work, we have deployed a  PSC / VCSA 6U1  in Singapore, and linked it to our London PSC on the same domain,

so we can use Enhannced Linked Mode.

Below diagram diagram describes the PSC / VCSA deployment.

 

PSC_Replication

Tried to logon to VCSA01 which is in our London vSphere and it took 10 minutes for the web client to load.

VCSA02 which is in Singapore appeared on the screen and couldn’t be expanded.

Hosts and Clusters on VCSA01 didn’t show any tabs. So, Web Client wasn’t responding as it should, and couldn’t do any work.

c# client worked OK.

As soon as we powered off PSC02 / VCSA02, Web client started responding as it should.

 

It seems that PSC replication is affected by high latency, which in our case is ~ 200ms.

 

Question here is why VMware or any of the nice blogs around hasn’t got any maximum latency numbers around PSC replication.

We have based a design around Enhanced Linked Mode with our upgrade to vsphere 6 around the globe, if latency is an issue we need to change everything.

 

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