Installing vcenter without DNS & NTP

I recently had to install an offline install of vCenter, and this could give you some grey hair if you dont configure this the way vCenter wants to.

After downloading the iso file you mount it and browse to the setup.exe file in the vcsa-ui-installer

You choose a basic install:

Go through basic setup until:

In the Network setup, you have 2 specific settings that needs to change.

• the FQDN needs to be IP address

• The DNS server does not accept 127.0.0.1, so use your gateway

When the first setup phase is done you are asked for NTP.

if you don`t have this, use “sync with esxi host”

The rest should be okay, and hopefully you have a functioning vcenter after some time.

My experience was that VMware has tightened the DNS settings from vcenter 8.01 -> 8.02 , so latest version 8.0u1c was easier than u2.

If you have a some failed attempts like i did, you need to clean up your vsan config on your target host:

Cleanup vSAN Configuration

• ssh to your ESXi host and do: esxcli vsan cluster leave.

• check the output of: esxcli vsan storage list and get the “VSAN Disk Group UUID”

• continue with: esxcli vsan storage remove -u

• Repeat on the second node.

• reboot node

If this does not work there are some excellent “small footprint” DNS servers like Bind and MaraDNS that you can install on a Linux server, like Ubuntu.

Be sure to do the setup before you import the vm into the zone without internet and DNS. This is because Bind , MAKE and MaraDNS are not default packages in the standard linux image, but some distros have a full/complete image, so unless you have a proxy possibility to do a “apt-get install Bind”, use that image instead.

Doing the config, export vm as *.ova, and import it to your dark site could be a solution.

A small windows server2022 with DNS services is also a possibility, just to have a standalone mgmt DNS service for VMware, and here you can configure everything from the CD.