vCloud Director 9: SAML2 Federation for System Administrators

In the past in vCloud Director 8.20 (and older versions) system admins (the provider context) could use local, LDAP and vSphere SSO accounts. vCloud Director 9.0 now replaces vSphere SSO accounts with more generic SAML2 accounts which means you can have the same IdP mechanism in the tenant and system context.

This change however breaks the previous vSphere SSO federation which was as simple as entering the vSphere Lookup Service URL and enabling the vSphere Single Sign-On with a check box (which in vCloud Director 9.0 is no longer there).

Here is the procedure how to enable vSphere Single Sign-On in vCloud Director 9.0.

1. Login to vCloud Director as system admin and from administration>System Settings/Federation download the metadata document (spring_saml_metadata.xml) from the link provided (../cloud/org/System/saml/metadata/alias/vcd). Make sure the certificate (below) is valid.
2. Login to vSphere Web Client as SSO admin and go to Administration/Single Sign-On/Configuration/SAML Service Providers
3. Import the metadata from step #1
4. Download the vsphere.local.xml metadata from the link below.
   
5. Go back to VCD, check use SAML Identity Provider and upload metadata from #4.

Note that Import Users/Group source now changes from vSphere SSO to SAML.