Joining ESXi to a Domain

Hi All,
In this post i am going to show how to add an ESXi Hypervisor 5.0 server to a Windows 2008-R2  Active Directory by using vSphere Client.
 



Click on your host in the vSphere Client and then navigate to your “Configuration” tab

 

Once you are here, click on the “Properties” button that is all the way on the right hand side of the client. You will see the box below pop up that shows the “Local Authentication” selected which is the default mode.

 

Type in the name of your domain and click the “Join Domain” button on the above screen and you will see the following screen which will ask you for domain credentials to authenticate.

Also your status in your Authentication Services Settings should reflect your domain that you have joined:

 
You should be able to see your ESXi server in the ActiveDirectory. You can move it to the appropriate Organization Unit

At this point, we want to login to vSphare using domain credentilals, right click on our host, click the “Add Permissions” menu option

You will see the permissions dialog box below which displays after drilling into the Add Permissionoption. We need to click on the “ADD” button under “Users and Groups” to display our locations of where to choose users:

 

Once we are there, notice how we now have the option to select users from both the local server as well as our domain which we joined:

 

A couple of things to note:

• You need to make sure your vCenter box is joined to the domain which you want to add users from and you are logged into your vCenter box with a user who has permissions to add users from the domain.  This is of course a side task in addition to joining your ESXi box to the domain.
• You will see your ESXi box in your “Computers” container in Active Directory after the domain joining finishes which will help confirm that it was successful
  

In conclusion this is a rather easy task to accomplish with the new vCenter/vSphere interface and most administrators will have no problems with the logic behind how permissions work in vSphere as it is rather intuitive.