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Retrieving vCenter Server certificate (Machine, VMCA Root, STS & Trusted Root) details using the vSphere API 

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In the vSphere UI, users can easily view and manage all of their vCenter Server certificates by navigating to Administration->Certificate->Certificate Management as shown in the screenshot below.


There are four types of vCenter Server certificates: Machine SSL, VMware Certificate Authority, STS Signing Certificate and the Trusted Root. On the main summary view, we can see the validity of the certificate, which is useful to quickly determine if you need to plan on replacing a specific certificate. We can also get more information about a specific certificate by clicking on the "View Details".

A question recently came up internally asking whether there is a vSphere API to retrieve all of this information programmatically, especially the validity of the certificate?

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Quick Tip - Retrieving the vSAN Rekey Interval using PowerCLI

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Since the release of vSAN 6.5.1, the PowerCLI team has introduced a number of high level vSAN cmdlets (current list HERE) that can be used to automate a variety of tasks. While the existing vSAN cmdlets are quite extensive and continues to get updated with new functionality, it will never be able to cover the rich set of functionality that is provided by vSAN.

For functionality that is not available in the high level vSAN cmdlets, user can still perform the task using PowerCLI, but they will need to directly access the underlying API, in this case the vSAN Management API.

Note: This concept also applies to other high level PowerCLI cmdlets, if you are unable to locate the functionality, then most likely you will need to interrogate the API using PowerCLI.


In the case of retrieving the vSAN Data-in-transit encryption rekey interval, which is not available in the high level Get-VsanClusterConfiguration cmdlet, we can easily retrieve it with the following PowerCLI snippet:

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vSphere UI behavior change for VM Disk I/O Shares & Limits in vSphere 8.x

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If you use the vSphere UI to configure individual virtual disk I/O shares or limits for a Virtual Machine, it looks like this functionality has been removed in vSphere 8.x in favor of using VM Storage Policies, which has been around for almost a decade now.

Prior to vSphere 8.x, you could configure both disk shares and limits on an individual VMDK as shown in this screenshot below for a vSphere 7.x environment:


While this capability can be useful, it does come with some operational overhead of having to configure each and every virtual disk that has such a requirement and can certainly be error prone. Fortunately, this problem of defining various storage requirements and attributes for a VM and its virtual disks has already been solved with Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) and the use of VM Storage Policies.

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