Deploy a vCenter Server Appliance by Using the CLI

You can use the CLI installer to perform an unattended deployment of a vCenter Server appliance. You must run the CLI deployment from a Windows, Linux, or Mac machine that is in the network on which you want to deploy the appliance.

Prerequisites

• See Prerequisites for Deploying the vCenter Server Appliance.
• Prepare Your JSON Configuration File for CLI Deployment.
• Review Syntax of the CLI Deployment Command.
• Verify that the user name with which you are logged in to your client machine, the path to the vCenter Server installer, the path to your JSON configuration file, and the string values in your JSON configuration file contain only ASCII characters. Extended ASCII and non-ASCII characters are unsupported.
• The Visual C++ redistributable libraries version 14.0 or newer needs to be installed to run this utility on versions of Windows older than Windows 10. The Microsoft installers for these libraries are located in the vcsa\ovftool\win32\vcredist directory.

Procedure

1. Navigate to the vcsa-cli-installer subdirectory for your operating system.
   • If you are running the deployment on Windows OS, navigate to the vcsa-cli-installer\win32 directory.
   • If you are running the deployment on Linux OS, navigate to the vcsa-cli-installer/lin64 directory.
   • If you are running the deployment on Mac OS, navigate to the vcsa-cli-installer/mac directory.
2. (Optional) Run a pre-deployment check without deploying the appliance to verify that you prepared the deployment template correctly.

   vcsa-deploy install --precheck-only path_to_the_json_file

3. Run the deployment command.

   vcsa-deploy install --accept-eula --acknowledge-ceip optional_arguments path_to_the_json_file

   Use optional_arguments to enter space-separated arguments to set additional execution parameters of the deployment command.

   For example, you can set the location of the log and other output files that the installer generates.

   vcsa-deploy install --accept-eula --acknowledge-ceip --log-dir=path_to_the_location path_to_the_json_file