How to change vCenter and vSphere IP Address ( embedded PSC )

/ November 7, 2018/ VMware, vSphere

Hello everyone, this is a small personal blog post about changing the vCenter and vSphere IP Address. changing the IP Address is not without any risk, perform a backup of your vcenter vm’s before doing some changes.

After configuring a new vCenter server and a vSphere cluster with 9 Hosts, the network team decided that the vCenter server must be reconfigured with an different IP address. The already configured DNS names, cannot be changed ( to avoid problems with certificates ) so we used the old names.

Since the release of vSphere 6.5, changing the ip address of the vSphere and vCenter is official supported.

Change the IP Address of the vSphere ( ESXi ) Host

There are a few ways to change the IP Address of the ESXi host, most common is to use the console provided by your vendor ( IPMI,ILO,Draq )

you can also use putty and insert the command #DCUI

Change the IP Address of the vCenter ( embedded PSC )

Changing the IP Address of a vCenter with a embedded PSC is very Easy and can be done with the GUI or by CLI, for the GUI you can use the url “https://FQDN:5480/” Note that you must logged in with your root account.

1. Select “Networking”
2. Select “Manage”
3. Select “Edit” if the GW or DNS must be changed
4. Select “Edit” on the NIC that contains the old IP Address.

you can also replace the current Gateway Address at step 4. While doing this change I’ve noticed that the change dind’t applied after a reboot of the server, changing the default gateway address at step 3 solved this problem.

After changing the IP Address, check if you can reach the server on the new address and reboot the server.

As said before, you can change the IP Address by CLI

Command> shell
Shell access is granted to root
root@vcenter01 [ ~ ]# cd /etc/systemd/network
root@vcenter01 [ /etc/systemd/network ]# ls
10-eth0.network
root@vcenter01 [ /etc/systemd/network ]# vi 10-eth0.network

After changing the Address or/and gateway save the file with “WQ” and reboot the server.

after rebooting the server, check if the status of the single sign-on domain is “running” you can check this on the appliance web interface “https://FQDN:5480/” Summary

After changing the vCenter server ip Address, I noticed that the ESXi host random reports a message back with a status of disconnected to the vCenter server. Because the heartbeat packets are being send to the old vCenter ip adress, we must change the property “ServerIp” on every ESXi host.

• Connect to the ESXi host with SSH
• cd /etc/vmware/vpxa/
• vi vpxa.cfg
• change the property “ServerIp”to the new vCenter server ip address

Thanks for reading and good luck with changing the ip address of the vCenter.