6.7

Table Of Contents

Deploying the

vCenter Server Appliance and

Platform Services Controller

Appliance 2

You can deploy the vCenter Server Appliance with an embedded or external Platform Services Controller

to manage your vSphere environment. You can deploy a Platform Services Controller appliance and

Platform Services Controller appliance.

You can deploy the vCenter Server Appliance or Platform Services Controller appliance on an ESXi host

5.5 or later, or on an ESXi host or DRS cluster from the inventory of a vCenter Server instance 5.5 or

later.

For information about the software included in the vCenter Server Appliance 6.7, see Overview of the

vCenter Server Appliance.

For information about the software and hardware requirements for deploying the

vCenter Server Appliance and Platform Services Controller appliance, see System Requirements for the

vCenter Server Appliance and Platform Services Controller Appliance.

The vCenter Server Appliance installer contains executable files for GUI and CLI deployments, which you

can use alternatively.

The GUI deployment is a two stage process. The first stage is a deployment wizard that deploys the

OVA file of the appliance on the target ESXi host or vCenter Server instance. After the OVA

deployment finishes, you are redirected to the second stage of the process that sets up and starts the

services of the newly deployed appliance.

The CLI deployment method involves running a CLI command against a JSON file that you previously

prepared. The CLI installer parses the configuration parameters and their values from the JSON file

and generates an OVF Tool command that automatically deploys and sets up the appliance.

Important For topologies with external Platform Services Controller instances, you must deploy the

replicating Platform Services Controller instances in a sequence. After the successful deployment of all

Platform Services Controller instances in the domain, you can perform concurrent deployments of multiple

vCenter Server appliances that point to a common external Platform Services Controller instance.

The vCenter Server Appliance and Platform Services Controller appliance have the following default user

names:

VMware, Inc.