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Automating certificate-manager CLI operations in vCenter Server (VCSA)

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I recently had a customer inquiry where they were interested in automating the certificate replacement for vCenter Solution Users when using the /usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate-manager CLI, which is found within the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).


Note: One important thing to understand is that with vSphere 7.0, the vCenter Solution User certificates have been deprecated and the ability to replace the internal certificates will be removed in a future release as mentioned in the referenced vSphere blog post.

VMware does not recommend replacing the internal vCenter Solution User certificates, but for users who may have an organization requirement to do so, the operation is performed interactively using the certificate-manager CLI as mentioned earlier.

By design, the certificate-manager is meant to be consumed interactively and any non-interactive or automated use cases is not possible ...

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Retrieving detailed vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) Image information from vSphere Cluster using PowerCLI

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As more and more users are adopting vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) to simplify the lifecycle and configuration management of their ESXi hosts, you may want to get more information about a given vLCM image that has been associated with a specific vSphere Cluster.

While you can certainly get this information using the vSphere UI, you can also get this detailed information by using the vLCM REST API, which can easily be consumed using variety of vSphere SDK Clients including PowerCLI.

For inventory and/or auditing purposes, automation is typically the answer, especially at scale. I will not bore you with the details, but I recently created the following PowerCLI function called Get-vLCMClusterImageInformation and given the name of a vLCM-enabled vSphere Cluster, it will provide you with the associated ESXi base image and all Solutions and Components that is associated with a given image.

UPDATE (02/06/25) - The script has also been updated to also include information for a vLCM image that has integrated with an Hardware Support Manager (HSM) to provide firmware information.

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Get notified when VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Bringup has completed

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While updating and testing my Automated Lab Deployment Script for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), I often found myself checking whether the bringup process has completed or not using the Cloud Builder UI.


Ideally, I could configure some type of notification that would alert me immediately when the deployment has finished or if it ran into an issue and has failed.

Since Cloud Builder is just a Photon OS VM, that gave me an idea for a quick workaround ... 🤔

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