While working with vSphere 5 and vCloud Director, I stumbled onto a piece in the vSphere Client Help files that I haven’t seen in previous versions of vSphere (or maybe it existed and I wasn’t aware). That is, the ability to add an ESXi host to a specific Organizational Unit above and beyond adding it to Active Directory. VMware ESXi Active Directory integration has gotten much easier once they partnered with Likewise. In vSphere 4 if I wanted an ESXi computer account to drop into a specific OU, I pre-created the computer account before the ESXi host to the domain. In vSphere 5, the ESXi host can be joined to the domain and placed into an explicit OU all in the same step.
Say for example I wanted my esxi5 computer account to be placed into the boche.mcse domain in an OU path of /Lab/Servers as shown below:
I can accomplish this now by providing the full path in the Domain field as shown below:
The result is that the esxi5 computer account is now placed in the desired OU hierarchy:
Doing anything interesting w/ Splunk?
@Andy: Nothing out of the ordinary. I was using as a logging target for vSphere 4.
Works also with 4.1 (at least with U1 and U2). I assume it’s mentioned somewhere in the docs, as I added my ESXes this way from the very beginning.
ESXi 5.0 adds even more undocumented parameters to AD integration. Read my blog post here: http://v-front.blogspot.com/2012/01/undocumented-parameters-for-esxi-50.html.
– Andreas