6.5.1

Table Of Contents
2 Prepare a certificate file that includes the signed VMCA certificate along with the full CA chain of your
third-party CA or enterprise CA. Save the file, for example as rootca1.crt.
You can accomplish this by copying all CA certificates in PEM format into a single file. You start with
the VMCA root certificate and end up with the root CA PEM certificate. For example:
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
<Certificate of VMCA>
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
<Certificate of intermediary CA>
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
<Certificate of Root CA>
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
3 Stop all services and start the services that handle certificate creation, propagation, and storage.
The service names differ on Windows and the vCenter Server Appliance.
Windows
service-control --stop --all
service-control --start VMWareAfdService
service-control --start VMWareDirectoryService
service-control --start VMWareCertificateService
vCenter Server
Appliance
service-control --stop --all
service-control --start vmafdd
service-control --start vmdird
service-control --start vmcad
4 Replace the existing VMCA root CA.
certool --rootca --cert=rootca1.crt --privkey=root1.key
When you run this command, it:
n
Adds the new custom root certificate to the certificate location in the file system.
n
Appends the custom root certificate to the TRUSTED_ROOTS store in VECS (after a delay).
n
Adds the custom root certificate to vmdir (after a delay).
5 (Optional) To propagate the change to all instances of vmdir (VMware Directory Service), publish the
new root certificate to vmdir, supplying the full file path for each file.
For example:
dir-cli trustedcert publish --cert rootca1.crt
Replication between vmdir nodes happens every 30 seconds. You do not have to add the root
certificate to VECS explicitly because VECS polls vmdir for new root certificate files every 5 minutes.
Platform Services Controller Administration
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