Recently, a hosting company wanted to know if their customers can have VMware View running on hosted vCenter/ESXi hosts.
The hosted vCenter Server was a shared resource and had many clusters that were used by other customers as well. The vcenter credentials used in VMware View cannot have permissions to all other clusters.

In summary:

  • VMware View will be running in the customer’s domain
  • vCenter Server will be in the hosting company’s domain
  • Customers cannot have permissions at a vCenter Server level
  • View Composer cannot be co-installed on the vCenter Server

Solution:

  1. Install View Composer standalone on a separate machine in the customer’s domain.
  2. Add the domain user account that will be used for View Composer to the local administrators group on the View Composer machine.(This is done so that View can talk to the Composer Service installed on the View Composer machine)
  3. Ensure that the View Connection server and Composer are able to resolve the fqdn of the vCenter Server and the ESXi hosts. (DNS forwarders can be used)
  4. Use a service account and configure the required permissions. The password for this service account will not be shared with the customer. The credentials will be manually added to the View configuration by the hosting company.