NickManaging vCenter 6 and the PSC Services
Introduced with vSphere 6 is the Platform Services Controller, or PSC for short. Simply put, the PSC is a bunch of services that can reside embedded within a vCenter server, or can be external to the vCenter server. William outlined how to monitor vCenter and PSC services using VIMTOP on a vCSA, but in this article I’ll outline what you can configure using the Web Client.
To manage the vCenter Server or PSC services, on the vSphere Web Client home screen navigate to Administration -> System Configuration. From here you have 2 options, Nodes or Services.
Nodes
From the Nodes selection, you have the ability to select any one of your vCenter or PSC instances that are joined to a single SSO domain. When installing either a vCenter or a PSC server you have the option to create a new or join an existing SSO domain. Once you join this domain you are enabling this instance to participate in “enhanced linked mode”. Remember, linked mode now works in either the Linux based vCSA or Windows based installable vCenter server.
A node can either be a vCenter server, an external PSC or a vCenter Server with an Embedded PSC (the case for these screenshots). Once you have a node selected, the right hand section of the Web Client will show you the information about that Node.
The selected Node’s summary page has some general information, such as IP, hostname, type (vCenter, PSC or both), health, uptime and the virtual machine on which the Node resides.
Also on the summary page is a Workload section. This outlines some of the virtual machine in-guest statistics, such as Storage, Memory, Swap and Load.
Finally on the summary tab is the Services Health and Health Messages. It buckets the services into the categories of Critical, Warning, Unknown, Good and Not Applicable. Clicking on each will list the services under each category.
On the Node’s Monitor tab, you can start to see a little more detail about the Workload. Within this tab are for sub-tabs for Networking, Storage, Memory and CPU. Clicking on the workload statistics on the summary tab will bring you into the relevant sub-tab here for more details.
Getting to the Manage tab -> Settings sub-tab of a selected node, you will find a number of helpful tools. Firstly, if you’re using the linux based appliance (and you should be!) there are Access settings that you can also configure on the VM’s DCUI. From here you can enable Local login, SSH login or the Bash shell. Going one more step, you can now change the appliance (vCenter or PSC) name, DNS, IPv4 or IPv6 settings. Within this tab you can also configure the in-guest firewall rules to block or allow IPs per ethernet interface. Finally, this is also where you can join and leave an Active Directory domain. I will leave the the Certificate Authority sub-tab for another post.
Services
Going back to the top and selecting Services instead of Nodes will give you the visibility and settings for all services within your SSO domain. The following table outlines the available services with their default startup type for a vCenter Server with an embedded PSC and embedded Postgres database (AKA everything on one node):
"Service | Description | Startup"
"Auto Deploy|Supports network-based deployment of ESXi hosts. | Manual"
"Content Library Service|Enables sharing and management of VM templates and ISO images across vCenter instances | Auto"
"Data Service|Universal query API to VMware CIS data | Auto"
"Hardware Health Service|Collection and analysis of IPMI sensor metrics from hardware running ESXi | Auto"
"Inventory Service|Enables search, list, query and extension of vCenter inventory information | Auto"
"License Service|Provides licensing support for the vSphere environment | Auto"
"Transfer Service |Enables movement of content like VM templates, scripts, ISO images across sites and vCenter instances | Auto"
"VMware ESX Agent Manager |ESX Agent Manager (EAM) is the simple and fully-integrated way to deploy and monitor ESX Agent VMs and VIBs on ESX hosts. | Auto"
"VMware Message Bus Configuration Service |VMware Message Bus Configuration Service | Manual"
"VMware Open Virtualization Format Service |Enables open virtualization format based provisioning of virtual machines via Content Library | Auto"
"VMware Performance Charts Service |Provides Overview Performance Charts support for vSphere Web Client. | Auto"
"VMware Postgres |Embedded VMware Postgres Relational Database | Auto"
"VMware Syslog Service |Provides syslog support for VMware CIS services | Auto"
"VMware vCenter Server |VMware vCenter Server | Auto"
"VMware vService Manager |VMware vService Manager | Auto"
"VMware vSphere ESXi Dump Collector |VMware vSphere ESXi Dump Collector enables support for collecting core dumps from remote hosts. | Manual"
"VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service |VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service | Auto"
"vSphere Virtual Infrastructure Management Client |vSphere Virtual Infrastructure Management Client | Auto"
"vAPI Endpoint |Provides single point of access to vAPI services | Auto"
Some of the services have a number of configurable settings behind them on the Manage tab, but others do not. Regardless, I would recommend that you only change these if absolutely necessary (advised to by VMware). The other thing shown is whether changing the setting will require a restart of that particular service.
Starting, stopping, restarting or changing a service’s startup type is configured on a per-node basis. Selecting the Node you wish to configure the service on, then going to the Related-Objects tab will allow you to set these.
You should find managing Linux (and Windows) vCenter instances a little easier now. There’s certainly a lot more options to configure and much better visibility into what’s going on.