Showing posts with label ESX Admins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ESX Admins. Show all posts

Friday, January 13, 2012

Undocumented parameters for ESXi 5.0 Active Directory integration

Since vSphere version 4.1 it is possible to integrate an ESXi host into a Microsoft Active Directory (AD). After the host is joined to the domain you can assign permissions to AD groups and users by connecting directly to the host with the vSphere client.
Instructions on how to do this (with ESXi 5.0) is available e.g. here in the VMware Online Documentation.

I first looked at AD integration when vSphere 4.1 was released and found one really annoying drawback in it that ruled it out from a possible implementation in our environment: When an ESXi 4.1 host is joined to a domain it will automatically (and repeatedly!) look up an AD group called "ESX Admins", and as soon as it finds this group it will grant this group Administrator permissions on the ESXi host. The real problem here is that the name ("ESX Admins") of this AD group is hard coded and can not be configured.
This may be a nice feature for small environments - you just need to create this group, fill in the necessary people and you are done. But if you think about an enterprise environment of a large company with lots of different sites, IT teams and vSphere installations, but only one Active Directory, you can not assume that all ESXi hosts in this company are managed by the same group of people.

When vSphere 5.0 was released I looked at the release notes and documentation to find out if this drawback was removed, but I did not find any positive information. Tests I did also showed that an ESXi 5.0 host behaves the same way, looks up the "ESX Admins" group and adds it with Administrator permissions.

However, recently I stumbled over the following when browsing the advanced configuration parameters of an ESXi 5.0 host:
Configuring the "ESX Admins" group
Yes, with ESXi 5.0 it is possible to change the name of the AD group that is automatically added by setting the advanced configuration option Config.HostAgent.plugins.hostsvc.esxAdminsGroup. You can even completely disable this functionality by setting the option  Config.HostAgent.plugins.hostsvc.esxAdminsGroupAutoAdd to false.
I searched for this again in the VMware documentation and the Knowledge Base, but did not find it being mentioned anywhere. So it looks like at the time this is completely undocumented, but it works as expected (I could not resist from immediately trying this out)!