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Most of the changes have come about as the company pivots away from vCenter’s historical Microsoft Windows roots, to being purely a Linux based Virtual Appliance. VMware’s “Linked Mode” feature has a number of names – from Linked Mode to Enhanced Linked Mode, to now it being also called “Hybrid Link Mode”. I would recommend starting which gives a good round-up of all them. Far too many possible permutations for me to cover – so I would seriously considering studying the documentation in full. There now 8 supported topologies for multiple vCenters and “Enhanced” Link Mode – and 3 depreciated one as well. So I would have two PSC and vCenters one for New York and the other for New Jersey. This more distributed model is not supported with the “embedded” deployment type – where the vCenter and PSC service reside in the same instance – and seems to have been introduced with vSphere 6.5 U1. This ensures licenses can be assigned freely around the organisation – and not be “locked” to specific site location.
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In this scenario – I wanted the appearance of multiple vCenters across many sites – and wish to link them together for ease of administration – and the sharing of licensing repositories. WARNING: Please pay close, close attention to your FQDNs as during the process built-in certificates are created which if you subsequently correct/change hostname will be invalid.
JOIN VCENTER 6.5 TO ACTIVE DIRECTORY INSTALL
The vCenter install validates your IP/DNS configuration and won’t let you proceed until its correct. Note: As ever before you begin – make sure the FQDNs of your proposed PSC and vCenter are listed in DNS – and reserve your IP addresses accordingly.