An administrator has observed that the vSphere Global Inventory is only available from the management domain vCenter. The Global Inventory is not available from the workload domain's vCenter. Why is the "Global Inventory" missing from the workload domain's vCenter?

The ability to view a "Global Inventory" across multiple vCenter Servers in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is enabled by vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM). During the creation of a workload domain, SDDC Manager automatically joins the new vCenter Server to the management domain's Single Sign-On (SSO) domain, establishing ELM. This configuration should allow an administrator to log in to any vCenter (management or workload) and see the inventory of all linked vCenters. The scenario described, where the global view is only available from the management vCenter, indicates a fault. This symptom points to an incomplete or failed linking process, where the workload vCenter has not correctly registered or synchronized with the rest of the SSO domain.

B. Supervisor Management is a feature for enabling vSphere with Tanzu to run Kubernetes workloads and is unrelated to vCenter inventory visibility or linking.
C. Inventory synchronization in an Enhanced Linked Mode environment is an automatic background process; it is not a manual task that an administrator needs to run.
D. "VIDB" is not a standard VMware component acronym. Furthermore, external identity source configuration does not control the vCenter-to-vCenter inventory linking mechanism.

1. VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 Administration Guide, "vCenter Server in VMware Cloud Foundation" section.

This document states: "All vCenter Server instances in a VMware Cloud Foundation system are connected in Enhanced Linked Mode. You can log in to any vCenter Server instance and view and manage the inventories of all the vCenter Server instances in the group." This confirms that the behavior described in the question is abnormal and indicates a problem.

2. VMware vSphere 7.0 Documentation, vCenter Server and Host Management, "vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode" section.

This official documentation specifies: "To join vCenter Server systems in Enhanced Linked Mode, you must connect them to the same vCenter Single Sign-On domain." This directly connects the SSO configuration (Option A) to the functionality of a global inventory view. A failure in this process would lead to the described issue.

3. VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 Architecture and Design Guide, "vCenter Server Architecture" section, page 18.

This guide details the SSO topology: "VMware Cloud Foundation implements a single vCenter Single Sign-On domain by default... When you create a VI workload domain, SDDC Manager joins the vCenter Server for the workload domain to the common vCenter Single Sign-On domain." This highlights that the SSO and linking configuration is the foundational step for cross-vCenter visibility.