Set Up An External Database - VMware ACE Management Server Administrator's Manual

ACE Management Server Administrator's Manual
To create users and groups for integration with Active Directory
1 Create a user that ACE Management Server can use to connect to the LDAP server and use for querying.
Make a note of the sAMAccountName value for that user (for example, aceuser.)
2 Create an ACE Administrators group in the domain.
3 Add ACE administrator users to the ACE Administrators group.
4 (Optional) Create a Help Desk group and assign users to it for the Help Desk role.
You can log in to the Help Desk Web application with your administrative LDAP credentials or password.
Creating a Help Desk role allows you to permit certain users to perform Help Desk tasks from within the
Help Desk application but does not give them access to other administrative tools.

Set Up an External Database

Before you begin, make sure that you have one of the following supported database servers:

For a Windows‐based ACE Management Server– Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or higher;
Oracle Database 10g
If you use a Microsoft SQL Server database, the database must be hosted on a system that uses the same
locale as the system that hosts ACE Management Server. For example, if ACE Management Server is
installed on a Japanese system, the database server must also be installed on a Japanese system and must
use Japanese collation.

For a Linux‐based ACE Management Server – PostgreSQL 7.4 or higher
Before you install the database on a Linux host, make sure the unixODBC RPM package is installed on the Linux
system. VMware recommends that you update the package to the latest version released for your specific
Linux distribution. The unixODBC package provides an ODBC API to programs running on Linux systems that
is similar to the Windows ODBC API.
The package contains the libodbc shared library, providing the ODBC Driver Manager API to other
programs, a set of configuration utilities, and ODBC drivers for popular databases. On both Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, the ODBC driver for PostgreSQL is included in the
unixODBC binary distribution package.
Also, make sure the unixODBC-gui-qt package is installed (this utility is included in the Red Hat Enterprise
Linux unixODBC package). This package is required to use the ODBCConfig X11 graphical configuration tool
for setting up a data source name (DSN).
To set up an external database
1 Install a database server on a host.
The external database does not have to be installed on the same server as ACE Management Server, but it
must be installed on the same platform. For example, if ACE Management Server is installed on a
Windows host, the database server must also be installed on a Windows host.
ACE Management Server creates the database schema automatically if proper access rights are granted.
2 Configure the database.
Ensure that you have a dedicated database and a user account that has full access to this database,
including rights to create tables. Do not give this database user permissions that it does not need. For
example, you might not want to give this account read or write permission to other databases that your
RDBMS manages.
All tables that are created in the database have a name starting with a PolicyDb_ prefix and indexes with
PdbIns_ or PdbLf_ prefixes. You might provide ACE Management Server with a DSN to a database that
it shares with some other application, if the database count is at a premium.
30 VMware, Inc.