Zsoldier's Tech Blog

Related to vSphere 5.5 and vCenter Server Appliance. Basically, when attempting to log into the web client I would get the following error message or the dreaded authenticating forever loading bar: Could not connect to vsphere web client contact your administrator to fix this issue Long story short, I did the following to fix my problem: Switched to embedded SSO and back to external SSO. Honestly, this step may or may not have been needed, but I did notice errors in my SSO server logs.  You might try step 2 first just to see. Under the admin tab select Yes for certificate regeneration and hit submit. Then switched back to no. Restarted Web Client Service. Details: Thankfully, I had another vCenter appliance attached to the same SSO server that was working fine.  So to troubleshoot, I looked at the virgo logs for the web client on the one that was working and that one that was not.  I noticed that my working vCenter Web Client would get a respon...

Summary: Connect-VIserver MyvCSAServer was not connecting using my service account's (for scheduled tasks) windows account.  It would always prompt for credentials.  Fairly odd since it has permissions and is able to connect to several other vCenters w/o inputting credentials. By the way, this is very convenient since I don't have to insert passwords anywhere in clear text or come up w/ some crazy solution to encrypt the password. Solution/Workaround: Simply log into the web client using the service account once.  Once authenticated, powerCLI should not have prompt for credentials. [This applied when the VCSA's default identity source is set to Active Directory (Windows Integrated Authentication) and is set as the default domain.  Active Directory as a LDAP server option will not work.] Hypothesis: I'm guessing this is some kind of weird SSO thing, where the account needs to get locally cached prior to allowing Windows integrated authentication.  I...