The vSphere Authentication Proxy service is available on each vCenter Server system. By default, the service is not running. If you want to use vSphere Authentication Proxy in your environment, you can start the service from the vSphere Web Client or from the command line.

The vSphere Authentication Proxy service binds to an IPv4 address for communication with vCenter Server, and does not support IPv6. The vCenter Server instance can be on a host machine in an IPv4-only or IPv4/IPv6 mixed-mode network environment. However, when you specify the address of vSphere Authentication Proxy in the vSphere Web Client, you must specify an IPv4 address.

Prerequisites

Verify that you are using vCenter Server 6.5 or later. In earlier versions of vSphere, vSphere Authentication Proxy is installed separately. See the documentation for the earlier version of the product for instructions.

Procedure

  1. Connect to a vCenter Server system with the vSphere Web Client.
  2. Click Administration, and click System Configuration under Deployment.
  3. Click Services, and click the VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy service.
  4. Click the green Start the service icon in the menu bar at the top of the window.
  5. (Optional) After the service has started, click Actions > Edit Startup Type and click Automatic to make startup automatic.

Results

You can now set the vSphere Authentication Proxy domain. After that, vSphere Authentication Proxy handles all hosts that are provisioned with Auto Deploy, and you can explicitly add hosts to vSphere Authentication Proxy.