Finding your vCenter server address

This document shows how to determine the value you should enter for your vCenter server address in a Google Distributed Cloud admin workstation configuration file or an admin cluster configuration file. In some cases, you might also want to to enter this value in a user cluster configuration file.

In certain situations you must enter an IP address, and in other situations you must enter a hostname. And in some cases, it doesn't matter. You can determine the appropriate value by inspecting the serving certificate of your vCenter server.

Download the serving certificate of your vCenter server, and save it to a file named vcenter.pem:

true | openssl s_client -connect VCENTER_IP:443 -showcerts 2>/dev/null | sed -ne '/-BEGIN/,/-END/p' > vcenter.pem

Replace VCENTER_IP with the IP address of your vCenter Server.

Open the certificate file to see the Subject Common Name and the Subject Alternative Name:

openssl x509 -in vcenter.pem -text -noout

The output shows the Subject Common Name (CN). This might be an IP address, or it might be a hostname. For example:

Subject: ... CN = 203.0.113.100

Subject: ... CN = my-host.my-domain.example

The output might also include one or more DNS names under Subject Alternative Name:

X509v3 Subject Alternative Name:
    DNS:vcenter.my-domain.example

Choose the Subject Common Name or one of the DNS names under Subject Alternative Name to use as the value of the vCenter server address in your configuration file. For example:

vCenter:
  credentials:
    address: "203.0.113.1"

vCenter:
  credentials:
    address: "my-host.my-domain.example"