Recently I deployed a new vSphere 6 vCenter with an embedded Platform Services Controller to the home lab for a PoC. Whilst the deployment was only meant to be temporary, it has evolved into a permanent feature. Unfortunately I need scalability with my PSC (high availability and across sites), so the embedded just wasn’t going to work. I needed to migrate it to an external PSC.

In the following example I had previously deployed an embedded PSC with vCenter to vcsa.nl.mdb-lab.com.

The first step of the migration was to deploy another PSC (called psc1.nl.mdb-lab.com), this time selecting External Platform Services Controller during the installation wizard:

I then chose to join an existing SSO domain:

I then selected the same site:

Finally I completed the PSC installation.

The next step was to repoint the existing vCenter to the new Platform Services Controller. To do this I SSH’d onto the console of the existing PSC/VC and used (substitute text in bold accordingly):

cmsso-util reconfigure --repoint-psc psc1.nl.mdb-lab.com --username administrator --domain-name vsphere.local --passwd VMware1!

When the command completed it returned:That’s all there was to it. It’s worth noting that the above is only possible using vSphere 6 Update 1. If your vCenter is running a version prior to this then you will need to upgrade first.

The next step is to configure my F5 LTMs to load-balance the PSCs, which I shall cover at a later date.