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 vCenter Server Management Interface 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, 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. Start the VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy service.
    Option Description
    vCenter Server Management Interface
    1. In a Web browser, go to the vCenter Server Management Interface, https://vcenter-IP-address-or-FQDN:5480.
    2. Log in as root.

      The default root password is the password that you set while deploying the vCenter Server.

    3. Click Services, and click the VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy service.
    4. Click Start.
    5. (Optional) After the service has started, click Set Startup Type and click Automatic to make the startup automatic.
    CLI 
    service-control --start vmcam
  2. Confirm that the service started successfully.

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.