VMware vCenter Server is a solution to manage VMware vCenter version 4.1 update 1 Users Application Data VMware VMware VirtualCenter SSL rui.key. Feb 11, 2014 Managing the license on VMware ESxi and VCenter is one of main job for system administrator.After the installation of the product, you may The license key is the same as you'd use for teh. VCenter Log Insight delivers automated log management through log analytics, aggregation and search. Log Insight analyzes your log data and offers insight relational information based on standard VMware log files. Log Insight comes as a virtual appliance which can be connected to both vCenter Server and vCenter Operations Manager. Sep 17, 2018 - VMware vCenter Server. Host profiles are also a component of vSphere Auto Deploy. Certain policies require user input to provide host-specific values. To support Auto Deploy for host profiles, an answer file is created that contains the definitions for those policies. eBay!

Managing the license on VMware ESxi and VCenter is one of main job for system administrator.After the installation of the product, you may need to add the new license to increase the capacity and you may need to remove the old license keys from the those products. Sometimes you may need to pull out the existing license keys for inventory purpose. Here we will see how we can manage the ESXi and VCenter server licence using VSphere Client .

How we can get the installed license keys of VMware ESXI servers and VCenter Server ?

1. Login to VSphere Client and navigate it home.

Deployment of vRealize Operations Manager. Login to vCenter – Right click Cluster or Host – Deploy OVA template – provide Name for appliance and select the OVA file downloaded. Provide the Location of the OVA Deployment File. Provide the Name for VM to display and select VM folder. Select the host and Next. VCenter Operations Manager 5.8.2 Assigning a Licensing Key. Posted on August 27, 2014. One of the items I noticed hanging up many users is how to assign a license key for vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS). In this blog I’m going to review the basic steps around this.

2.Navigate to Administration and Licensing .Here you can see the existing license of Vmware ESXI nodes and VCenter Server.

3.In order to install or remove the existing License keys , you need to click on “Manage VSphere Licenses” (Step:2). This will popup the below window to manage the VSphere License keys.If you want to add any new license keys , you can just copy & paste one by one.

4.The next step will be assigning the specific license keys to the products.In some cases, license may be purchased to run some limited VM’s and that needs to assigned to specific host.In this case ,you need to assign the license keys manually.For ESXi , you need to click on the first tab. The below window shows vCenter Server licenses(Second tab).If you want to remove any existing license keys ,you can remove it using the next step. Once you have done,you click on the confirm changes.

5.You can also extract the reports from the reporting tab. (Refer Image Step:2). Once you click on the reporting tab , you will get window like the below one.You can just click export to get the details in Excel sheet.It provides complete usage details of the installed license details.

when we are talking about VSphere licensing , i just want to let you know about the free license of ESXi and vCenter Server. VMware offers 60 evaluation period for vCenter Server and ESXi .So you need to search for free license keys of Vmware ESXi and vCenter server . You can install and test these products with complete features for 60 days. After 60 days ,you may need to install the license keys to keep working on these products. vCenter will not allow to administrate the ESXi nodes after 60 days without valid license keys.

The below tables provides the licensing requirements of newer version of VMware ESXi and vCenter Server.

ata Center Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure	Existing product version	Version to be upgraded to	Is a new key required?	The SnS Contract for the product is active, can the license key be upgraded in My VMware Portal?
vCloud Suite (Standard, Advanced and Enterprise)	5.1	5.5	No	The existing license key also unlocks version 5.5
	5.5	–	No	This is the latest version
vSphere or ESXi (Essentials, Essentials Plus, Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus)	4.x	5.0 or 5.1 or 5.5	Yes
	5	5.1 or 5.5	No	The existing license key also unlocks version 5.1 and 5.5
	5.1	5.5	No	The existing license key also unlocks version 5.1 and 5.5
	5.5	–	No	This is the latest version
vSOM – vSphere with Operations Management (Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus)	5.1	5.5	Yes	Yes.
	5.5	–	No	This is the latest version
vCenter Server (Standard and Foundation)	4.x	4.x or 5.0 or 5.1 or 5.5	Yes
	5	5.1 or 5.5	No	The existing license key also unlocks version 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5
	5.1	5.5	No	The existing license key also unlocks version 5.1 and 5.5
	5.5	–	No	This is the latest version

Thanks to VMware.

You can also download Free VMwareESXi 5.5 that VMware offers without any memory limitation. For more details,Check it here.

Check out for below articles as well,

Configure VNC for VMware virtual Machine Console. (vCenter doesn’t require to access VM’s console)

Thank you visiting UnixArena.

Generating SSL Certificates for usage with vCenter, Update Manager and the ESXi host is one of those tasks that keeps being push away. Accepting the self-signed certificates is fine in most situation, but getting validated certificates means a whole lot of pop-ups disappear and surprise surprise, I have also found that the vCenter Operations Manager feels smother and faster.

I recently followed Julian Wood’s excellent series on how to sign certificates for vCenter and Update Manager. Generating the SSL Certificates for vCenter Operations Manager goes along the same lines, but there are changed and maybe some configuration changes on the vCOPS UI-VM.

Julian recommends to install the latest 64-bit version of the OpenSSL Windows Binaries. Retrieve the Win64 OpenSSL v1.0.1 Light for Windows tool on the vCenter with it’s per-requisite Visual C++ 2008 Redistributables (x64) from Microsoft.com

Once the OpenSSL v1.0.1 Light is installed, we can add an System Environment Variable, so that the OpenSSL tool can find the path to the OpenSSL configuration file. Because I’m going to use the OpenSSL tool on the vCenter to generate the SSL Certificates for various VMware appliance, I need the variable to stay permanent. From the Control Panel on the vCenter, I add a new System Environment Variable like follows.

Adding the OPENSSL_CONF environment variable in the Control Panel

So that the next time you start the Command Prompt to generate OpenSSL Certificates, the variable is already present.

One of the best information I learned from Julian’s document is the modification of the openssl.cfg to add the option to use two subjectAltName for the DNS resolution. This allows the user to get a valid certificate when you connect to the vCenter Operations Manager 5.0, using the Fully Qualified Domain Name or simply the short name of the server.

To use this feature you will need to edit the C:OpenSSL-Win64binopenssl.cfg and add “req_extensions = v3_req” to the “[ req ]” section, and add “subjectAltName = DNS:vcops.vsphere.bussink.local,DNS:vcops” to the “[ v3_req]” section. I need to add that I also modify the default key length in the certificate request to 2048 bits.

[box] [ req ]

default_bits = 2048

req_extensions = v3_req

[ v3_req ]

subjectAltName = DNS:vcops.vsphere.bussink.local, DNS:vcops, DNS:192.168.1.18

subjectAltName = DNS:vcops.vsphere.bussink.local, DNS:vcops

[/box]

Update (29/03/2012): I added to my subjectAltName, the iPAddress of my vCenter Operations Manager UI. You will get the information from the vCenter Managed Object Reference portal ExtensionManager value (See screenshot at the bottom of the post). The entry is of format DNS:192.168.1.18

Update (02/04/2012): Thanks to Josh Perkins excellent article “vCenter Operations Manager 5 vCenter Plugin uses IP instead of DNS hostname“. I have removed the IP address subjectAltName in the certificate request in the code above.

To create the Certificate file I used the following commands. Go to the bin directory of the OpenSSL tools. Generate a new Certificate Request while keeping the Cert Private key on your vCenter server. I’m generating the vCOPS private key with the 2048bit RSA algorithms and the SHA256 Message Digest algorithms.

[box] cd C:OpenSSL-Win64bin

openssl req -new -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -sha256 -out vcops.csr -keyout vcops.key

[/box]

Generate vCOPS Certificate Request

Once we have the Certificate Request for the vCenter Operations Manager, we can submit it to the Public Key Infrastructure for certification. There are two ways to it, once from the command prompt and via the Web interface of the PKI.

Command Prompt Certificate Request

Windows Server 2008 R2 has a simple tool, to submit the Certificate Request directly the Microsoft Root CA (Enterprise Mode).

On my Certificate Authority I have cloned the default WebServer Certificate Template, and named it OpenSSL. I have also modified it’s Validity Period, Renewal Period. See completely at the bottom of this post to get an explanation and description of these changes.

My Microsoft Certificate Authority implementation is configured so that Certificate Requests need to be authorized, so the Submit/Retrieve process is composed of two commands here: certreq -submit and certreq -retrieve, if your Certificate Authority is not setup with validation, the submission/retrieval process is done in a single command.

[box]

certreq -submit -attrib “CertificateTemplate:WebServer” vcops.csr

or

certreq -submit attrib “CertificateTemplate:OpenSSL” vcops.csr[/box]

Submitting vCOPS Certificate Request from Command Prompt

At this point the Certificate has been submitted to the Root CA authority in the domain. Please note the RequestId number when you submit the Certificate Request. Once the Certificate has been authorized and generated you can retrieve it back to the vCenter.

[box]certreq -retrieve 16 vcops.cer [/box]

If we open the vcops.cer in Windows, we can see that the Certificate has also proper Certificates in the Certification Path. This is important to ensure that browsers can validate the vCOPS Certificate all the way up to the Certificate Authority (with the Issuing CA is it’s an Intermediate Certification Authority).

Verify your vCOPS Certificate for the Certification Path

We now need to build a PKCS#12 container file with the Certificate, the Private Key and output it to the .PFX file.

[box] openssl pkcs12 -export -in vcops.cer -inkey vcops.key -name vcops -out vcops.pfx[/box]

vCenter Operations Manager 5.0 does not use the PKCS#12 file format, but the PEM format, and requires that the Private Key is not protect by password. So we re-transform the the .PFX with the Private Key into the .PEM format.

[box] openssl pkcs12 -in vcops.pfx -inkey vcops.key -out vcops.pem -nodes[/box]

Transform vCOPS from PKCS12 Container to PEM format

At this point open the Administrator interface of vCenter Operations Manager on the SSL pane, and import the PEM certificate.

The url is https://vcops.<your-domain>/admin/

But here comes a tricky part. It’s debugging time.

It is very possible that your Import of the OpenSSL Certificate fails with a General error occured. Like below.

OpenSSL Import General Error Occurred

What I found is that the apache2 Web Server on vCOPS did not like loading my SSL Certificate, because it saw that the certificate was for a FQDN that it could not figure out. I modified the /etc/hosts file to ensure apache2 got the proper hostname while starting up and therefore accepted the OpenSSL Certificates.

In the next screenshot you see the error messages from the apache2 at startup when it cannot figure out it’s name and when it does.

[box]/sbin/service apache2 restart [/box]

vCOPS apache2 startup with default /etc/hosts and modified /etc/hosts

You can always check the vCOPS log files at /var/log/vmware/ for issues.

In the screnshot below we see that I tried to install onces the vcops.pfx format, and then the vcops.pem certificate (@23:38:15), I then restarted the vCOPS Web Service and all is good after 23:46:13.

[box] tail /var/log/vmware/vcops-admin.log[/box]

Checking the vcops-admin.log for SSL install issues

We can now connect to vCenter Operations Manager using the FQDN or the short-name.

I have also found that once the OpenSSL Certificate has been changed, that the vCOPS Interface feels much more reactive.

Appendix 1) – My OpenSSL Certificate Template

On my Active Directory Certificate Services I have cloned the default WebServer Certificate Template, and named it OpenSSL. I have also modified it’s Validity Period, Renewal Period and the need for the Certificate Authority Manager to approve all Certificate Requests.I highly recommend that you set the Validity Period for your Certificate Template. The CA Manager Approval really depends on your environment. As I sometimes do Auto-Enrollment tests for devices, I don’t want to pollute my Root CA with hundreds of superseding certificates.

OpenSSL Certificate Template Properties - Validity Period

Appendix 2) – Retrieve the Root & Intermediate Certificate Authority Public Key using CertUtil

In this second appendix, I will briefly show how to retrieve the Root Certificate Authority Public Key from the command prompt. You should also retrieve the Intermediate CA if you have one.

[box] certutil -ca.cert -config “domctrl01.vsphere.bussink.localBussink Root CA” RootCA.cer[/box]

Vrealize Operations Manager Crack

Retrieve Certificate Authority Public Key RootCA.cer

Update on 16/03/2012. Changed the Win64 OpenSSL v1.0.1 Light tools.

Update 27/03/2012. Added a additional subjectAltName to the Certificate request. But my had my parameters wrong.

Update (27/03/2012): I have added a new subjectAltName on the to my openssl.cfg. I added the FQDN name of my vCenter server in the Certificate request. With vCenter Operations Manager 5.0, you get the integration within the vCenter Client in the Solutions & Applications section. The SSL Certificates will therefore be checked by the vCenter Client against the vCenter FQDN name.

Update 29/03/2012. Thanks for Kinsei for having raises the question on the topic of the SSL Certificate usage via the vCenter Client. The vCenter Operations Manager is connected to the vCenter Server not by an FQDN name, but by an IP Address. You can find the value when you connect to your vCenter server’s Managed Object Reference (mob) settings portal.

https://vcenter/mob/ Content ExtensionManager ExtensionList com.vmware.vcops

Vmware Vcenter 7.0 Keygen

Update (02/04/2012). Here is another update. Josh Perkins has written up a great article on how to ensure that your vCenter uses a FQDN or shortname to speak to your vCenter Operations Manager. This means that administrators and user on the vSphere Client do not get invalid SSL Certificate requests anymore. Thanks Josh !!