I'm setting up a new data centre, working with some hardware on the other side of the country with nobody onsite for a few days. So in the meantime I've set up port forwarding to access internal servers' web interfaces. Configuring our SAN and ESXi hosts was no problem, but I'm having trouble with the vCenter installation.
The installer hangs:
Install – Stage 1: Deploy vCenter Server
80%
Waiting for RPM installation to start. This may take several minutes…
And then does nothing. Presumably it's trying to communicate directly with the server, which it will not be able to do. Short of waiting for next week when I'll have a laptop put on the local network, how can I continue this installation?
- Is there a way to configure the VCSA installer to use a different port for communication?
- Is there a list of ports I can forward to the vCenter server to complete the install?
- Can I resume the installation process manually from the command line on the VCSA?
Best Answer
So you've remotely installed ESXi on your hosts and have access to the web UI of the hosts and now you're trying to install the VCSA remotely by launching the installer from your side and hoping it can reach your hosts over the internet?
If I've got that right, why not deploy a temporary VM on one of the hosts and launch the VCSA installer from there? You can upload an ISO to your datastore, which will take some time but beats waiting until next week, and deploy a VM from which to deploy the VCSA.