WilliamLam.com

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

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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.

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

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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)?

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Quick Tip - vSphere with Tanzu fails to sync Content Library with 500 Internal Server Error

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While setting up a new vSphere with Tanzu environment (which can run with just 32GB of memory), I ran into a really strange issue where my vSphere Content Library templates were not being picked up by the VM Service. I was going insane as I have configured this a number of times and I have never ran into this particulare issue before. I thought maybe it was a configuration problem but the enablement of vSphere with Tanzu was 100% successful and everything was showing green.

While looking at the vmware-system-vmop-controller-manager container log, I noticed that the VM Service can see the template but it just fails to extract and process it and throws a 500 Internal Server Error message:

E0917 12:08:23.060929 1 content_library_provider.go:275] vsphere/contentlibrary "msg"="error extracting the OVF envelope from the library item" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "contentLibraryUUID"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6" "itemName"="ubuntu-22.04-custom-image"
E0917 12:08:23.060984 1 content_library_provider.go:275] vsphere/contentlibrary "msg"="error extracting the OVF envelope from the library item" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "contentLibraryUUID"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3" "itemName"="photon-ova"
E0917 12:08:23.060998 1 contentsource_controller.go:203] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="failed to get VirtualMachineImage from content library" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "clProviderName"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6" "clProviderUUID"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6"
E0917 12:08:23.061011 1 contentsource_controller.go:203] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="failed to get VirtualMachineImage from content library" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "clProviderName"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3" "clProviderUUID"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3"
E0917 12:08:23.061032 1 contentsource_controller.go:401] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="Error in syncing image from the content provider" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3"
E0917 12:08:23.061079 1 controller.go:317] controller/contentsource "msg"="Reconciler error" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3" "namespace"="" "reconciler group"="vmoperator.vmware.com" "reconciler kind"="ContentSource"
E0917 12:08:23.061123 1 contentsource_controller.go:401] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="Error in syncing image from the content provider" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6"
E0917 12:08:23.061165 1 controller.go:317] controller/contentsource "msg"="Reconciler error" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6" "namespace"="" "reconciler group"="vmoperator.vmware.com" "reconciler kind"="ContentSource"

I was running out of ideas and things to try and I decided to look at the content library configuration to see if I had missed something.

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