VMware Platform Services Controller (PSC)

VMware Platform Services Controller (PSC) is a new service in vSphere 6 that handles the infrastructure security functions such as vCenter Single Sign-On, licensing, certificate management and server reservation.

PSC provides one appliance- or Windows-based virtual machine platform to systems administrators for centralized management of these common infrastructure services.

PSC is a distributed service that automatically replicates information such as licenses, permissions and roles to other PSC instances. The maximum number of PSCs per vSphere domain is set at eight. High-availability for PSCs is achieved through local load-balancing technologies, though only four PSCs can reside behind a load balancer. PSCs are also latency sensitive and can only tolerate up to five minutes of time skew between PSC nodes.

In vSphere 6, the following components are installed in PSC:

• VMware Appliance Management Service (only in appliance-based PSC)
• VMware License Service
• VMware Component Manager
• VMware Identity Management Service
• VMware HTTP Reverse Proxy
• VMware Service Control Agent
• VMware Security Token Service
• VMware Common Logging Service
• VMware Syslog Health Service
• VMware Authentication Framework
• VMware Certificate Service
• VMware Directory Service