Welcome to the vSphere 5.1 Update 1 VUM SSL certificate replacement procedures. In Part 11 we installed VMware vCenter Update Manager (VUM) 5.1 Update 1. Recently VMware released the vCenter Certificate automation tool, which helps lessen the pain associated with replacing the self-signed certificates with trusted certificates. I recommend you use that...
When building vSphere VM templates best practices would recommend that a number of security lockdowns be incorporated into the template. There are a variety of sources for recommended lockdowns, such as the VMware vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide. But what if you already have VMs in production that you need to lock down, or...
Yippee..a free tool from VMware! This nice little tool runs compliance scans against vSphere hosts and compares the results to the VMware Hardening Guidelines. Almost a year ago I wrote a short blog announcing their hardening guide here. Since then, VMware released a hardening guide for vSphere 4.1, which you...
One of the continuing pain points with VMware vSphere is the unnecessarily complicated procedure to install trusted SSL certificates in ESXi, vCenter and VUM. Up until 4.1 Update 1 (released 2/10/11), VMware had no public procedures to update the VUM SSL certificate, over 1.5 years after vSphere 4.0 hit the streets. Plus...
Over the last couple of days I've been performing ESXi 4.0 to 4.1 build 320137 upgrades. During the upgrade process today one of my servers had a hiccup and the web services was not responding. After a couple of reboots and non-responsive web services I iLO'd in (it's an HP...
Historically VMware has not used the strongest hashing algorithms to store root passwords on ESXi or ESX hosts. And to make matters worse, ESX/i 4.1 had a major security hole that was open for over four months, which you can read about here. The short story is that ROOT passwords...
In my previous blog I discussed how the VMware 4.1 VAAI 'write same' implementation in a 3PAR T400 showed a dramatic 20x increase in performance, creating an eager zeroed thick VMDK at 10GB/sec (yes, GigaBYTES a second). The other major SCSI primitive that VAAI 4.1 leverages is XCOPY (SCSI opcode 0x83). What this...
So in my previous blog entry I wrote about how I upgraded a 3PAR T400 to support the new VMware vSphere 4.1 VAAI extensions. I did some quick tests just to confirm the array was responding to the three new SCSI primitives, and all was a go. But to better...