As a part of one of the projects I am currently working on, I was required to set up a new Vmware vCenter server instance. Until recently, I has been installing vCenter manually from scratch on Windows server machines. This time I was advised to try a vCenter server appliance (vCSA). The deployment of the new vCenter server instance is indeed quicker and smoother, but the fact that the operating system is Linux presents several little less documented challenges.
For instance, in order to allow incoming HTTP connections from modules like Vmware View (not that it is normally recommended – I am setting internal testing environment and want to avoid certificates installation), proxy.xml configuration file should be modified according to the following guidelines. Since we are no longer in good old Windows world, folders like c:\Documents and Settings\AllUsers\Application Data\VMware VirtualCenter do not exist. In this case, find / -name proxy.xml command comes to help. The full path is /etc/vmware-vpx/proxy.xml and the configuration changes will take effect just like on windows machine after service vmware-vpxd restart.
One last thing: initially I misconfigured the proxy.xml file and vpxd service got stuck during initialization. In this case it was very useful to look at vxpd log: – /storage/log/vmware/vpx/vpxd.log which clearly mentioned the misconfigured section.