I was doing some testing in my lab with vCenter 7 (VCSA), using snapshots. I rolled back a test vCenter instance and was unable to subsequently login. The error I got was: User name and password are required. I also noticed that the windows session authentication was also check-able, even...
A few days ago VMware released a minor update to vCenter to bring it up to vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1c. The update applies to both the Windows and vCenter Server appliance deployment models. If you are using vCloud Automation Center (vCAC), then you will want this update. Update 1c...
Fresh off the press is an updated version of my vCenter 5.5 SSL certificate Toolkit script. Last year when I did my popular vCenter 5.1 install series the posts contain a series of scripts and CLI commands to replace the SSL certificates. While that process worked for many people, it still...
The previous 14 installments have all been leading up to this, installing vCenter. Yes, we are finally here. In this post we install vCenter, the windows vSphere client, fix profile driven storage, and configure vCenter to support a clustered SQL database. This post is not the end of the road,...
Now that you've read up on upgrade best practices and SSO enhancements in the first four installments, we can get to the fun stuff! Understanding vCenter 5.5 SSL certificates. Ok maybe not fun for all, but fun to me. Last year in my 5.1 install series I just plowed right into...
One of the most critical aspects to securing your VMware vSphere environment is replacing the self-signed certificates with trusted certificates. VSS Labs is releasing a new product, called vCert Manager, which will vastly improve the SSL certificate management experience for VMware customers. Over the years I've written several articles detailing...
Hot off the presses are some ESXi 5.1 patches. This build of ESXi 5.1 (1157734) fixes several bugs and more importantly addresses some security issues. As always in any environment, please test out the patches thoroughly before putting them into production. Each environment is unique, and issues may surface that could cause you some headaches. These...
For those of you that have installed vSphere 5.1 and tried to use your own trusted SSL certificates, you will probably find the experience extremely tedious, cumbersome, error prone, and vastly harder than any product you've used before. Now out is the VMware vCenter Certificate Automation tool v1.0, to make...
In any enterprise environment, small or large, you should always used trusted SSL certificates for your VMware components. Very commonly people want to use a Microsoft Certificate Authority (CA). But, VMware requires certain properties be present in the SSL certificate to properly function. So you need to create a custom...
VMware UMDS (Update Manager Download Service) is a product which ships with vCenter that allows you to download patches for VUM, then use them in air-gapped networks where VUM can't directly download updates from the internet. UMDS 5.0 has some nice enhancements from 4.x, which helps limit the amount of...