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Quick Tip - Custom JSON for Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with Custom TLS Certificates

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ESXi hosts deployed with a custom CA signed TLS certificate can be consumed by either VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x Cloud Builder or 9.x VCF Installer using a custom JSON deployment manifest.

An additional securitySpec should be appended to your VCF JSON deployment manifest using the following format:

"securitySpec": {
  "esxiCertsMode": "Custom",
  "rootCaCerts": [
    {
      "alias": "custom-CA",
      "certChain": [
        "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----\nMIIDqzC...\n...\n...==\n-----END CERTIFICATE-----"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

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My VCF 9 Lab Network Diagram

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During VMware Explore, I had a request from an attendee who was interested in my physical networking and how it is all connected for my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Lab setup. The network diagram below is based on the following VCF 9.0 Hardware BOM (Build-of-Material) and using the following network configuration with additional commentary on each connection in the write-up below.


Note: All green lines in the diagram above represent 10GbE network connectivity and all blue lines in the diagram above represent 2.5GbE network connectivity.

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Quick Tip - When using self-signed TLS Certificates with VCF Private AI Services (PAIS)

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Like many of our users, I was excited to hear that VMware Private AI Services (PAIS) will now be included as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), I already had some ideas brewing in my head and I definitely needed to get some hands on!

While setting up some of the requirements for PAIS, I ran into a couple of issues that revolved around the use of self-signed TLS certificates, which is probably common for many of  you, especially in a lab/proof of concept environment.

I spent good chunk of the day debugging the issues, which was not even the worse part, but it was the error messages that we saw. The error messages was not from the product code, but rather the underlying libraries that it relies upon and if you try to interpret the message as-is, you could go down a rabbit hole.

PAIS Engineering is already aware of the issues I ran into, so these will be enhanced in future updates but I did want to share the scenarios in case you run into them while deploying PAIS in your environment.

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