I’ve been rebuilding my home VMware lab environment recently. I decided to jump right into vSphere 5.1 with the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance instead of the traditional Windows SQL combo. Deploying a vApp is much faster and cheaper from a licensing perspective than a full-blown Windows and SQL setup. After I imported the vCenter Virtual Appliance .OVA, I logged into the administrative web interface of the appliance (https://vcenterIP:5480) and started to make a few configuration changes. First up were assigning a hostname, setting the correct time zone, and setting a static IP address. The hostname change required a reboot of the virtual appliance.
After the reboot I tried to log into the vSphere Web Client at https://vcenterFQDN:9443/vsphere-client/. The login failed with an error:
Failed to connect to VMware Lookup Service – https://vcenterIP:7444/lookupservice/sdk
The site showed an invalid certificate when it loaded. When I viewed the certificate I found that the cert was issued to localhost.localdom. This didn’t match my hostname and peaked my curiosity.
A quick google pointed me to this article: https://www.vi-tips.com/2012/09/vsphere-web-client-failed-to-connect-to.html. The confirmed that the invalid SSL certificate was the right place to start troubleshooting, but the resolution didn’t seem quite right. I poked around in the vCenter Virtual Appliance web admin interface. On the Admin tab I found a button for ‘Toggle Certificate Setting‘. This button corresponds with the ‘Certificate regeneration enabled’ option.
After toggling this setting to Yes, I rebooted the virtual appliance using the reboot button on the System tab of the vCenter Virtual Appliance web admin interface. After the reboot, I was able to log into the slick new vCenter Virtual Appliance vSphere Web Client. The self-signed certificate now shows and Issued To: and an Issued By: name of the FQDN of my vCenter Server Virtual Appliance.
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