Active Directory

End of Marketing: As of 31 October 2025, new deployments of VMware Solutions offerings are no longer available for new customers. Existing customers can still use and expand their active VMware® workloads on IBM Cloud®. For more information, see End of Marketing for VMware on IBM Cloud.

End of Marketing: As of 17 July 2025, new deployments of VMware Regulated Workloads instances are no longer available for new customers. If you are an existing customer, you can still add or delete clusters, add or delete VMware ESXi™ servers or NFS storage, and add or remove services for your existing Regulated Workloads instances. As an existing customer, you can also view or delete your Regulated Workloads instances.

Microsoft® Active Directory™ serves to authenticate access to manage the VMware® instance only and not to house SaaS consumer users of the workloads in the deployed instances. The forest root domain name of the Active Directory server equals to the Domain Name Services (DNS) domain name that you specify for the initial instance deployment.

Domain name services (DNS) in this design are for the cloud management and infrastructure components only. The DNS zone files are also replicated on the Active Directory servers.

Active Directory groups and users

The Regulated Workloads Active Directory is used for the privileged administrators, service accounts, and the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions automation service ID.

Microsoft Active Directory user IDs

Active Directory user IDs
User User ID Description
IBM automation automation Used to add a host or a virtual machine for service. Also, to set up Active Directory and DNS entries
Privileged user Administrator Default Windows® user
Privileged user cloudadmin Default user for the customer to access vCenter Server
Nonprivileged cloudreadonly Read-only account for the customer

Microsoft Active Directory groups

Active Directory groups
User User ID Description
IBM automation or privileged users IC4v-vCenter vCenter Administration Group