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Automate changing the vSphere 6 Platform Services Controller IP address (and vRealize Automation)

 Author
Author
Sam McGeown
Steely-eyed missile man
Warning: This article is now 11 years old! It is highly likely that this information is out of date and the author will have completely forgotten about it. Please take care when following any guidance to ensure you have up-to-date recommendations.

vCenterNote: This falls under the “I don’t think this is supported” category – use this method at your own peril!

As part of some testing I’ve been doing for vRealize Automation DR scenarios, I wanted to test changing the IP address of a HA PSC pair using a script (think SRM failover to a new subnet).

What I didn’t want to do was simply edit the connections directly – quite often with the VMware appliances there are scripts on start-up to ensure the configuration is correct and consistent – what I wanted was to be able to find a more supported and reliable way.

Fortunately the VAMI scripts are deployed on most appliances and are included on the PSC. I was able to work out a process (mostly by trial and error!) of getting the IP change to stick.

 

# Update the network IP address (this is for IPv4, there are options for IPv6 too, and DHCP)
/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_network eth0 STATICV4 192.168.10.52 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.1
# This updates the IP in /etc/hosts - requires the FQDN as an argument or sets it to localhost.localdomain
/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_hostname vra.definit.local
# This makes the changes “stick” on reboot
/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_ensure_network_configuration eth0
reboot

I successfully used the the Guest Script Manager package from the VMware Center of Excellence to store and execute the script via vRealize Orchestrator, as well as using a bash script actually on the host. This worked during my testing to modify both the IP addresses in a PSC HA Cluster, and allowed (with some DNS changes) the fail-over to a completely different subnet.