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New SDDC Certificate Replacement Fling

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Certificate lifecycle management is not something anyone looks forward to, it is time consuming and usually not automated. However, it is a necessity for many of our customers. The process gets even more challenging when needing replace certificates across multiple VMware products, not only careful orchestration but also properly reestablishing trust between product just adds another layer of operational complexity. Within the Integrated System Business Unit (ISBU) at VMware, which produces both the VMware Validated Design (VVD) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the team has been working on a way to simplify certificate management, not only for individual products (working with product teams) but also holistically at the VMware SDDC level.

This initially started with the development of a tool called Certificate Generation Utility (CertGen), which helps customers generate new certificates for various products within the VMware SDDC. Although it was developed for the VVD, any VMware customer who consumed products within the VVD, could also leverage this tool. We all know certificate generation can be a pain, but it is not as challenging or as complex as the actual certificate replacement process itself which is also fully documented by the VVD team here.

This is where the new Fling comes in, the SDDC Certificate Tool, which automates the manual steps outlined by the VVD and helps customers easily replace certificates that they have created (CertGen or another process) and automatically orchestrates this across the different products within the SDDC. The tool is command-line driven and uses a JSON configuration file which can contain all or a subset of the VMware SDDC products, which is great for supporting different environments and allows for easy source control. Extensive pre-checks are also built into the tool to validate the certificates themselves (e.g. expiry, chain validation, etc) also also preventing miss-match of information (e.g. SAN entries, number of nodes, etc) which then get compared against your actual environment before any changes are applied. The JSON also contains a section referred to as Service Accounts, which is merely other VMware product accounts that the tool supports to reestablish trust after replacing the certificate for given product. 

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Quick Tip - How do I tell if NSX-V or NSX-T is installed?

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This question came up last week asking for a programmatic method to identify whether NSX-V or NSX-T is deployed in your environment. With NSX-V, vCenter Server is a requirement but for NSX-T, vCenter Server is not a requirement, especially for multi-hypervisor support. In this post, I will assume for NSX-T deployments, you have configured a vCenter Compute Manager.

Both NSX-V and NSX-T uses the ExtensionManager API to register themselves with vCenter Server and we can leverage this interface to easily tell if either solutions are installed. NSX-V uses the com.vmware.vShieldManager string to identify itself and NSX-T uses the com.vmware.nsx.management.nsxt string to identify itself.

Here is a quick PowerCLI snippet that demonstrates the use of the vSphere API to check whether NSX-V or NSX-T is installed and provides the version shown in the registration:

$extensionManager = Get-View ExtensionManager

foreach ($extension in $extensionManager.ExtensionList) {
    if($extension.key -eq "com.vmware.vShieldManager") {
        Write-Host "NSX-V is installed with version"$extension.Version
    } elseif($extension.key -eq "com.vmware.nsx.management.nsxt") {
        Write-Host "NSX-T is installed with version"$extension.Version
    }
}

Here is a screenshot from my environment which has both NSX-V (6.4) and NSX-T (2.1) installed:


Note: Due to some current testing, I have not upgraded my NSX-T deployment to the latest 2.2 release, so I do not know if the version gets bumped to match the actual released version

Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment 

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While working on my Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blog series awhile back, one of the things I was also working on was some automation to help build out the required infrastructure NSX-T (Manager, Controller & Edge), Nested ESXi hosts configured with VSAN for the Compute vSphere Cluster and Pivotal Ops Manager. This was not only useful for my own learning purposes, but that I could easily rebuild my lab if I had messed something up and allowed me to focus more on the PKS solution rather than standing up the infrastructure itself.

To be honest, I had about 95% of the script done but I was not able to figure out one of the NSX-T APIs and I got busy and had left the script on the back burner. This past weekend while cleaning out some of my PKS research documents, I came across the script and funny enough, in about 30minutes I was able to solve the problem which I was stuck for weeks prior. I just finished putting the final touches on the script along with adding some documentation. Simliar to my other vGhetto Lab Automation scripts, I have created a Github repo vGhetto Automated PKS Lab Deployment

UPDATE (06/19/18) - I have just updated the script to also include the deployment and configuration of the PKS components (Ops Manager, BOSH Director, Harbor & Stemcell). The script by default will now configure everything end-2-end and you will have a fully functional PKS environment that you can start playing around with. For complete details, please see the Github repo which has the updated requirements and documentation. Below is a screenshot of the PKS deployment and configuration which requires the use of the Ops Manager CLI (OM).


The script will deploy the following components which will be placed inside of a vApp as shown in the screenshot below:

  • NSX-T Manager
  • NSX-T Controller x 3 (though you technically only need one for lab/poc purposes)
  • NSX-T Edge
  • Nested ESXi VMs x 3 (VSAN will be configured)
  • Ops Manager


The script follows my PKS blog series and automates Part 3 (NSX-T) and the start of Part 4 (Ops Manager deploy), please refer to these individual blog posts for more information. The goal of the script is to enable folks to jump right into the PKS configuration workflows and not have to worry about setting up the actual infrastructure that is needed for PKS. Once the script has finished, you can jump right into Ops Manager and start your PKS journey.

Here is a sample execution of the script which took ~29 minutes to complete.


The full requirements for using the script be found on the Github repo and below are the software versions that I had used to deploy and configure PKS: