6.5.1

Table Of Contents
Certificate Management Overview
The work required for setting up or updating your certificate infrastructure depends on the requirements in
your environment, on whether you are performing a fresh install or an upgrade, and on whether you are
considering ESXi or vCenter Server.
Administrators Who Do Not Replace VMware Certificates
VMCA can handle all certificate management. VMCA provisions vCenter Server components and ESXi
hosts with certificates that use VMCA as the root certificate authority. If you are upgrading to vSphere 6
from an earlier version of vSphere, all self-signed certificates are replaced with certificates that are signed
by VMCA.
If you do not currently replace VMware certificates, your environment starts using VMCA-signed
certificates instead of self-signed certificates.
Administrators Who Replace VMware Certificates With Custom
Certificates
If company policy requires certificates that are signed by a third-party or enterprise CA, or that require
custom certificate information, you have several choices for a fresh installation.
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Have the VMCA root certificate signed by a third-party CA or enterprise CA. Replace the VMCA root
certificate with that signed certificate. In this scenario, the VMCA certificate is an intermediate
certificate. VMCA provisions vCenter Server components and ESXi hosts with certificates that include
the full certificate chain.
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If company policy does not allow intermediate certificates in the chain, you can replace certificates
explicitly. You can use thePlatform Services Controller Web interface, vSphere Certificate Manager
utility, or perform manual certificate replacement using the certificate management CLIs.
When upgrading an environment that uses custom certificates, you can retain some of the certificates.
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ESXi hosts keep their custom certificates during upgrade. Make sure that the vCenter Server upgrade
process adds all the relevant root certificate to the TRUSTED_ROOTS store in VECS on the
vCenter Server.
After the upgrade to vSphere 6.0 or later, you can set the certificate mode to Custom. If certificate
mode is VMCA, the default, and the user performs a certificate refresh from the vSphere Web Client,
the VMCA-signed certificates replace the custom certificates.
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For vCenter Server components, what happens depends on the existing environment.
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An upgrade of a simple installation to an embedded deployment, vCenter Server retains custom
certificates. After the upgrade, your environment will work as before.
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For an upgrade of a multi-site deployment, vCenter Single Sign-On can be on a different machine
than other vCenter Server components. In that case, the upgrade process creates a multi-node
deployment that includes a Platform Services Controller node and one or more management
nodes.
Platform Services Controller Administration
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