A while ago I decided to purchase an official wildcard ssl certificate to use in my VMware demo/lab environment. Purchasing the certificate turned out to be the easy part. The next step was installing the certificate on different VMware products, like vCenter (which includes Update Manager and some web services nowadays), View connection servers, vCenter operations, and Zimbra.

I went trough the official documentation, and learned very quickly this was not as simple as I had expected. All products have very specific installation instructions, and some are better then others.

After some googeling I found a great resource for installing certificates on different products.

Michael Webster, VCDX #66 and vEXPERT, has some excellent documentation that can be found on his blog  Long White Virtual Clouds

This really helped me out to get the certificates installed, thanks Michael!

I had only one issue left after installing my certificate on my vCenter Operations Server.

When I connected to my vCenter Server, messages kept popping up that the certificate name for my vCOps server was incorrect. This was caused by the fact that when vCOps registers with vCenter, it uses it’s IP address instead of hostname.

After some more research, I found a blog article from Josh Perkins at vStable.com that told me how to fix this.