External sites accessed by vCenter for vLCM Operations

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

This article is a reference for customers configuring their corporate firewalls.

Resolution

vCenter requires periodic access to certain external sites for updates to information used by vCenter  such as new release content and hardware compatibility for vSAN and vSphere.  If a firewall blocks access to any of the target sites, some functions of vCenter's vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) may return outdated or incorrect information. vLCM will work with the information it last downloaded which may be out of date and cause misleading results. New releases will not show up in the depot, newly certified systems or hardware may not be recognized properly, errors in the compatibility data will persist uncorrected

Please find below the list of external sites accessed by vCenter for vLCM Operations:

• The list of 10 IPv4 and 10 IPv6 addresses that comprise the CDS for hostupdate.vmware.com. Please refer Public IP list for VMware Update Manager (IP Addresses of hostupdate.vmware.com).
• The URL for the vSAN HCL download, https://partnerweb.vmware.com/service/vsan/all.json . Please refer Updating the vSAN HCL database manually for more information on how to update the vSAN HCL database.
• The URLs for VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) information, http://auth.esp.vmware.com/ and https://vvs.esp.vmware.com for VCG compliance assesment.