vCenter Client for Apple iPad installation and setup

Vmware released the vCenter client for iPad this week. It’s a real neat application and allows you access to your virtual infrastructure from your mobile device, this being the iPad. The App is located on Apple’s App store and you can view further information about it here (Vmware vSphere client for Apple iPad). While it’s quite easy to download the app to your iPad there is some background setup that needs to be done first. Firstly realize the security risk of accessing your virtual infrastructure from your mobile device and make sure you put extra measures in to insure this is as secure as possible. i.e. establish an ipsec vpn first. Secondly we will need to download the Vmware vCenter Mobile Access Virtual Appliance from Vmware located here (Vmware vCenter Mobile Access Virtual Appliance). Will be installing this Virtual Appliance and connecting to our virtual infrastructure using the vCenter iPad client in this tutorial. Lets begin.

1. Once you’ve downloaded the OVF of the vCenter Mobile Access Virtual Appliance (link located above), open vCenter, click on the File Menu and select Deploy OVF Template. Select the OVF file and click Next.

2. Information is displayed about the Virtual Appliance. Click Next.

3. Click Accpet for the End User License Agreement and click Next.

4. Give a name to the Virtual Appliance and select the Virtual Machine folder location. Click Next.

5. Select your Datacenter and then Cluster you wish to install the Virtual Appliance to. Click Next.

6. Select the resource pool location in the cluster and click Next.

7. Select the datastore to hold the Virtual Appliance and click Next.

8. I usually thin provision so I will do the same for this virtual machine. Click Next.

9. Select the virtual network and click Next.

10. A summary of the Virtual Appliance is displayed. Click Finish to deploy the virtual machine.

11. When you first power on the Virtual Appliance, it will receive an IP address via DHCP. Access to the management web page is https://:5480

12. Browse to the management webpage and enter in the default username of root and password vmware. Click Login. Within here you can change the ip address from dhcp to static. To change the password of the root user, login on the console and type passwd, enter in the new password.

13. Now let’s move onto configuring the iPad. First I assume you have downloaded the App. Go into Settings and browse down the left hand side until you see vSphere Client. Tap on it and on the right hand side enter in the Virtual Appliance IP Address. You only need to enter the IP Address, nothing else.

14. Click the home button on the iPad. At this point I would establish the VPN tunnel if you have created one. Launch the Vmware vSphere client for iPad and enter in your vCenter Server address (It will accept Name or IP Address), your username and password that you would normally use to authenticate to vCenter.

15. You are now logged into your vCenter Server. At the top of the screen you can see a summary of how many hosts and VMs are running in the environment, as well as the list of Hosts below and the amount of VMs running on them.

16. Tapping on one of the hosts will bring you to this next screen, where you can see a summary of the Hosts CPU, Memory and NICs, as well as the virtual machines running on this particular host at the bottom. Click on the upper right hand corner of a VM where you can see the little circle with a line running through it will give you a graph of CPU, Memory, Disk and Network.

17. Clicking on the Performance button at the bottom of the screen will display graphs for CPU, Memory, Disk and Network for this host.

Disclaimer:
All the tutorials included on this site are performed in a lab environment to simulate a real world production scenario. As everything is done to provide the most accurate steps to date, we take no responsibility if you implement any of these steps in a production environment.