Once vCD has imported and the welcome options dealt with (EULA, Licensing and so on), you will be able to login to vCloud Director proper. The default user name is admin and default with the virtual appliance version, but you can easily change this under the “Administration” tab, and the Users node.

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As with a great many products from VMware now there’s a step-by-step wizard that will take you through the main configuration, and these “light” up as each step is completed.

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So my first task was to make vCloud Director aware of my vSphere environment, by adding in my vCenter system. I manually specified the vCenter/Web Client in the UI – of course whatever method you use to communicate to vCenter – you will also need to supply the IP/FQDN of the vShield Manager that is part of the vCenter instance.

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Once you’ve completed this task you will find that “Attach vCenter” on the “Home” page becomes “Attach another vCenter”. Additionally, you should also see it in the “Manage & Monitor” tab, under > vSphere Resources, >vCenters. Of course, you can add additional vCenter here as well. I noticed two things here – first the right-click option to open the Web Client on the vCenter5.1 appliance, and also that the vShield Manager IP address is exposed. In fact despite specifying the vShield by FQDN, the edit dialog box shows not the name but the FQDN.

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Once you have vCenter listed in vCloud Director you should see it appears as a solution in >vCenter Solutions Manager >Extension Types:

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