HOWTO: Automate the installation of the External Platform Services Controller using PowerCLI & JSON - Part 3


Platform Services Controller VMware vRealize vSphere

Published on 11 August 2016 by Christopher Lewis. Words: 337. Reading Time: 2 mins.

This is the final post in a series of post on automating the deployment of the Platform Services Controller (PSC). To be honest I didn’t expect these posts to turn into a series but as I like to share.

The previous two articles in this series can be found here:

Within this final post, I will tackling the automated deployment of a two node PSC Cluster and will be sharing the script I use.

The Concept

The concept for the script was simple, rather than running two scripts (one for the Primary PSC and one for the Secondary PSC), I wanted a script that could install both PSC one after the other and configure them within a single SSO site and domain.

The script is currently configured to install the new PSC Cluster onto an already existing vCenter environment (using the PSC_on_VC.json and PSC_replication_on_VC.json files). Typically you would do this in a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) scenario where you wanted to install a payload" vCenter responsible for the management of the payload resource clusters. However, it could be easily changed to deploy directly onto the ESXi host (as I did in Part 1 of the series) so that it can be used for the deployment of your “management” vCenter.

The Script

Possible/Future Enhancements

  • I’m not a Powershell or PowerCLI guru and some of my programming/scripting techniques are a bit “old skool” so there is probably multiple ways to make this quicker/faster and with less code.
  • There is no reason why you couldn’t add in the relevant extra fields from the VC_on_VC.json file and have two PSC’s and a vCenter deployed just from the one script.
  • There is no reason you could have some of the properties (such as SSO password) exposed as parameters rather than storing them as clear text.

Happy Scripting!

Published on 11 August 2016 by Christopher Lewis. Words: 337. Reading Time: 2 mins.