Lately I’ve been playing around with VMware vSphere Host Profiles. This feature creates baseline configurations for your ESX / ESXi host based on a reference host you configured in advance.

One of the configuration settings in Host Profiles is the Active Directory (AD) configuration. As you can read in this post you can add your ESXi host to AD. This way ESXi is added to AD and can use AD for authentication.

The bug

And here is where my problem start. As you can see in my post I want my ESXi host to be added to the directory “OU=Servers,OU=ESXi” in my domain “DEVTEST.LOCAL”. When creating a host profile with from this ESXi hosts configuration, Host Profiles will only add the value “DEVTEST.LOCAL” to the “Configuration Details” of the Host Profile.

Now when applying the newly created Host Profile to a non-configured host, will result in an error that the host can not be joined to AD (Unless you have Domain Admin rights for the domain and can add computers to the the OU Computer). This is due to the fact that the specific directory structure isn’t added to the “Configuration Details” by Host Profiles when taking a snapshot of the configuration of the ESXi host.

Solution

How to solve this problem? Well actual the solution is very simple. Add the AD OU directory structure, in my case /Servers/ESXi, to the “Configuration Details” of the Host Profile. This can be done by manually editing the “Configuration Details” of the Domain Name under Active Directory Configuration. You just add the directory structure to the domain name. Also described in the note of this post.

Solution results in error : This solution will result in the ESXi host being added to the domain to the correct OU structure, but as a result the ESXi host will never reach the status Compliant. This is due to the fact that the Host Profile configuration states “DEVTEST.LOCAL/Servers/ESXi”, but the ESXi host presents the configuration as “DEVTEST.LOCAL” which results in an Non-Compliant status which is incorrect.

Hope this will be solved in the next release of VMware vSphere.