Dell Management Plug-in with DNS Aliases

A tricky configuration piece of the Dell Management Plug-in that I discovered the hard way was that you must log in to vCenter via the vSphere Client with the same name or IP address with which you used to register vCenter with the Dell Management Plug-in Virtual Appliance. And I mean *exactly* the same, perhaps even with an FQDN. You can’t register vCenter in the Dell virtual appliance with an IP address and then turn around and log in to the vSphere Client with your usual server name or, in my case, a DNS alias or CNAME.

As you can see above, I’ve created a CNAME record for the first of my vCenters that are in a Linked-Mode group. I’ve named it vCenter. This is how I log into the vSphere Client – by just typing vCenter in the Name/IP address field. When I first registered the Dell plug-in via the virtual appliance, I registered the first vCenter server by its FQDN – let’s call it, myvcenter.company.net. Going to the Dell plug-in in the vSphere Client you get a nice error stating that the Dell Management Plug-in cannot access vCenter. Showing details gives you nothing, but don’t despair quite yet.

Now, as long as you know vCenter is up and network access (i.e. firewall) is configured between vCenter and the virtual appliance, the error tells us what the problem is: you have connected to your vCenter server using a different network name or IP address than you registered the Dell Management Plug-in virtual appliance with. Easy enough, I thought, simply register the vCenter server with the FQDN or some such. No dice – if you register with FQDN and connect to vCenter with a DNS alias, you still get the error. So let’s do *exactly* what the error says and register vCenter with the DNS alias, in my case, “vCenter.” Uh-uh – that didn’t even let me register vCenter. So I tried an FQDN of the DNS CNAME record itself: vcenter.testlab.net instead of mycenter.testlab.net

This at least let me register vCenter. I still couldn’t see the plug-in when logging into the vSphere Client with the *just* the alias (vcenter). Instead of logging in via the vSphere Client with the DNS alias, I used the FQDN DNS alias, vcenter.testlab.net. Turns out, I can, indeed, see the plug-in.

I hope this clears up any confusion folks have had with this. Let me know if it helps you.

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