ssl certificate

Is vCenter Server & ESXi hosts using VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) or custom CA certificates?

10.23.2018 by William Lam // 3 Comments

Customers have two primary methods of managing TLS certificates for their ESXi hosts, they can either use the built-in VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) which is part of vCenter Server or Custom CA Certificates. I will not go into the gory details, but you can read more about the options here in our documentation.

A question that I had received recently was whether you can determine the type of certificate an ESXi host was provisioned with and whether this could be programmatically retrieved using the vSphere API? The answer is yes. In vSphere 6.0, we introduced a CertificateInfo property which contains a number of fields including status, issuer, expiry and subject details and by inspecting either the issuer or subject property, you can determine the type of certificate on the ESXi host.

Here is a screenshot of the data using the vSphere MOB for an ESXi host that has VMCA-based certificate:

Here is a screenshot of the data using the vSphere MOB for an ESXi host that has custom CA certificate:

As you can see, for VMCA-based certificate the issuer's OU will have value of "VMware Engineering" and subject's emailAddress will have value of "*protected email*".

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New SDDC Certificate Replacement Fling

07.11.2018 by William Lam // 11 Comments

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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Automating the import of vCenter Server 6.x root certificate

07.27.2016 by William Lam // 14 Comments

In vSphere 6.0, you can now easily import your vCenter Server's trusted root CA certificate onto your client desktop by simply downloading it from the vCenter Server's landing page as shown in the screenshot below. Michael White had also recently wrote about this topic here which includes a step by step walk through.

Several weeks back I was working on an internal project which required the vCenter Server's root certificate. I was already aware of this interface and had written a quick and dirty script to automate the process of downloading and importing the certificate to the system I was working on. To be honest, I did not think much of the script after I wrote it. It was just recently that Alan Renouf, who was also involved in the project mentioned that it might be worth sharing the script as others might also find it useful. I thought that was a good idea and re-factored the code a bit since it was being used in a slightly different context. While doing so, I also created an equivalent PowerShell sample since the original script was meant to run on either a Mac OS X or Linux platform.

With that, I have created a simple shell script called import-vcrootcertificate.sh which can run on either Mac OS X or Linux system and a PowerShell script called Import-VCRootCertificate.ps1

Both scripts are pretty easy to use, they accept a single command-line argument which is the Hostname/IP Address of the vCenter Server that you wish to import the root certificate from. Both scripts ere able to detect if the vCenter Server is Windows or the VCSA since they have a slightly different URL to the root certificate before performing the import. Since the script will need access to your certificate store, you will need to run the scripts using a privileged account.

Here is a screenshot of running the PowerShell script:

Here is a screenshot of running the shell script: