Posts

Hey! You got your VMworld in my Tech Field Day! The makers of Tech Field Day are having an “Extra” set of sessions at VMworld 2014 this year in San Francisco. As you may already know, the Tech Field Day group gets together a set of delegates to engage with some vendors about a variety of solutions. These discussions are all streamed live, as well as posted for later viewing. The discussions are to be technical in nature and can be directed in a much different path than a normal “set” presentation. ...

 Congratulations, if you’ve made it this far, you’re almost done with the replacing of your VMware SSL Certificates! If you’ve followed the previous posts, you’ll know that this has been a long path to completing your goal. This post finishes installing those certificates on your vCenter server. If you missed a part please check out the previous posts to get caught up. Create a Home Lab Certificate Authority Deploy Root Certificates via Autoenrollment Create VMware-SSL Web Certificate Template Create VMware Services Certificate Requests ...

I’ve seen quite a few VMware environments where when you login, you get that silly error message about a certificate not being trusted. This is something we can fix and more importantly be sure that the connections are trusted and encrypted. Prerequisites Trusted root certificates deployed to workstations - Instructions for Lab Environment Web-Certificate Template Deployed - Instructions for Lab Environment Certificate Authority Web Enrollment server - (If you followed the Lab Environment setup this should be on your CA already) Download OpenSSL and install it. I used 1.01h as the version for my lab which worked fine on a Server 2012 R2 Server which is also my vCenter Server. Download and install the vCenter Certificate Automation Tool from VMware. This is also found in the vCenter install media for vSphere 5.5. I prefer to create my certificate requests right from the VMware vCenter Server, so I install both the SSL Automation Tool and OpenSSL directly on the vCenter Server. If you’re using the VMware vCenter Server Appliance you’ll need to do this someplace else and there are some additional steps not listed in this post. Please see this KB article for more info: vCSA SSL Certs ...

 In order to replace our VMware SSL Certifactes, we need to create a web certificate template that we can then reuse to deploy all of the individual service certificates like vCenter, SSO, Update Manager, vCenter Orchestrator, etc. This certificate will be issued on the vCenter Server and requested in a later process. In part one of this series, we installed a certificate authority. In part two of this series, we deployed client authentication certificates to all our workstations and servers. ...

Home Lab SSL Certificates aren’t exactly a high priority for most people, but they are something you might want to play with before you get into a production environment. In part one of this series, I went over installing an Enterprise Root CA just to get us up and running. Again, be aware that for a production environment you should use an Offline Root CA and a Subordinate CA, but we’re in a lab and don’t need the additional layer of security. ...

If you would like to setup SSL certificates for your home lab, this guide should get you to a minimal installation. The goal of this post is to show you a basic way to setup certificates and should not be followed verbatim if you are planning a production deployment. For one thing, this post uses an Enterprise Root Certificate Authority and in a production environment you really should have an offline Root CA and an online Subordinate CA for security purposes. ...

I thought it was necessary to get this post out. I’ve heard numerous people say that they’ve tried to install VMware’s vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) but for one reason or another it just didn’t seem to work. I myself recently installed this and had issues, but somehow got it to install correctly on the third try. If you’ve had trouble configuring the vCAC appliance then look for the tip below. ...

There are a few Linux commands that vSphere Administrators should know for basic troubleshooting purposes and I wanted to take a second to review them in case you’ve typically been a Windows Administrator (like me). First, traversing the Linux file system is pretty similar to going through Windows directories from the command line. change directories Windows : CD C:dirname Linux : cd /dirname Show files and folders Windows : dir ...

VMtools is one of those nagging little pieces of software that always seems to be a pain to update. Back in my System Administration days, I commonly needed to report on which VMs had different versions of VMtools, and I have to admit, this was a more difficult property to find from my PowerCLI toolkit. Take a look at the old way of finding my VMtools versions through PowerCLI. ...

There are a ton of features now that VMware has that may require either an SSD or a Non-SSD to be available in your ESXi host. Host Caching requires an SSD and Partner products like PernixData also require an SSD to be available on the host. VMware’s Virtual SAN (VSAN) currently require both an SSD and a Non-SSD to be available. I’ve seen that many people want to try out these products in a lab environment, but don’t want to go out and buy another disk just to familiarize themselves with the product. In these cases, you can fool ESXi into thinking there is a device of the type you want. This can be done by using the esxcli commands on the host as documented here on VMware’s site. ...