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

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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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Auditing & Automating Disabled Protocols (TLS/SSLv3) for ESXi 6.0u3 & 6.5 using PowerCLI

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A couple of weeks back, I had received a question from one of our TAMs in regards to automating the disablement of specific TLS/SSL protocols for their ESXi 6.0 Update 3 hosts. As of vSphere 6.0 Update 3 and vSphere 6.5, customers now have the ability to completely disable TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1 and SSLv3 using the new TLS Reconfiguration Tool. Mike Foley did a nice write up here if you are interested in more details.

The TLS Reconfiguration Tool works well if you have the same version of vSphere for both your vCenter Server and ESXi host, but has challenges when you are in a mixed environment like this particular customer. In their environment, they are running vCenter Server 6.5 and ESXi 6.5 Update 3 which prevented them from using the TLS Reconfiguration Tool as this is a limitation with the tool today.

UPDATE (05/11/17) - Added support for ESXi 6.5 hosts as well

Given the TLS Reconfiguration Tool was written in Python, I was able to take a closer look at its implementation and I found that the settings that controlled the disabled protocols were just merely a few ESXi Advanced Settings which meant that this could be automated using standard vSphere Automation Tools that our customers were already familiar with. As part of this exercise, I also discovered the tool currently does NOT support disabling TLS/SSLv3 protocols for the Small Footprint CIM Broker (SFCB) service which is also required if you want to be in full compliance for a particular TLS protocol. Although there is not a direct SFCB API that allows you to manage the sfcb.cfg configuration file, there is still a way we can automate this without requiring SSH to the ESXi host which would technically be the alternative. Lastly, I was a bit surprised to see the TLS Reconfiguration Tool did not have a "query" option for listing the current disabled protocols for all ESXi hosts, but they do have it for vCenter Server itself.

To help this particular customer and others who may have specific TLS compliance requirements, I have created the following PowerCLI script called ESXiDisableProtocolConfiguration.ps1 which includes the following two functions:

  • Get-ESXiDPC - Retrieve the current disabled protocols for all ESXi hosts within a vSphere Cluster
  • Set-ESXiDPC - Configure the specific disabled protocols for all ESXi hosts within a vSphere Cluster

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