Generating certificate signing requests with the vSphere Certificate Manager

In certain organizations, for security or compliance reasons, a third-party or external certificate authority may be required. In such cases, the vSphere Certificate Manager can enable you to create the appropriate Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs). This can then be sent to the certificate authority to obtain the appropriate signed certificates. In the following recipe, we shall walk through the creation of CSRs.

Getting ready

All the steps in this recipe would be carried out from either an embedded deployment or on a Platform Services Controller (PSC). Ensure that you have the appropriate access credentials to the respective systems. In the following recipe, we will perform the steps from the vCenter Server Appliance with Embedded PSC.

How to do it...

1. Log in to the vCSA. Key in the command shell at prompt to access the shell.
2. The vSphere Certificate Manager utility can be invoked by the/usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate...