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Quick Tip - Certificate is not trusted when importing signed OVF/OVA into vCenter Server

06.12.2023 by William Lam // 1 Comment

An OVF/OVA can be digitally signed by a vendor to ensure its authenticity and when importing it into vCenter Server, the vSphere UI will either display that it contains a valid certificate or the certificate is not trusted as demonstrated in the example below:


If you are using a self-signed TLS certificate to sign an OVF/OVA, then it is expected that it would not be trusted by the Root Certificate Authority (CA) stored within the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).

However, if you have a valid TLS certificate that has been issued from a trusted certificate authority to sign an OVF/OVA, would you still see the error message? The answer actually surprised me.

[Read more...]

Categories // VCSA, vSphere Tags // ova, ovf, root certificate

Auditing vSphere Datastore activities (Download, Upload, Copy, Move, Rename and Delete)

04.18.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

What feels like a weekly response, vCenter Server Events, should always be your initial starting point in helping you understand the Who, What and When for something occurring within your vSphere environment. There are over 2K+ events that are published out of the box from vCenter Server with hundreds more from 2nd and 3rd party solutions that integrate with vCenter Server.

Combine vCenter Server Events with the power of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA), you now have a powerful Event-Driven Automation solution that can solve literally a limitless number of use cases, many of which have been shared by existing users found in this document HERE.

Today, I had received a question about auditing customers vSphere Datastore activities and identifying when someone has manually downloaded a Virtual Machine Virtual Disk (VMDK)?

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, vSphere Tags // export, ova, ovf, vmdk

Quick Tip - Dynamic OVF input properties using DeploymentOptions

07.23.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I first talked about OVF DeploymentOptions back in 2013, which enables an OVF/OVA author to define a set of deployment profiles (e.g. small, medium, large) which then automatically translate to a pre-defined set of compute, network and storage configurations when deploying an OVF/OVA. There are a number VMware Appliances that takes advantage of this OVF capability, the most well known is the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) when it prompts you to select the size of the VCSA that you wish to deploy.


Now although the primary driver for DeploymentOptions is for having out of the box resource configurations when deploying an OVF/OVA, it can also be used to control which OVF properties are shown to end users for input based on the selected deployment option.

I recently had a need for this capability and it was only after taking another look at the OVF specification, did I realize this was possible through the use of DeploymentOptions. Below is a quick example on how you can control specific OVF properties. Imagine, we have three deployment options: Development, Stage and Production which maps to the following DeploymentOption IDs: dev, stage and prod

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, OVFTool Tags // DeploymentOptionSection, ova, ovf

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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