Prepare Custom Security Certificates; View The Properties Of The Self-Signed Certificate File; Starting Ace Management Server Configuration - VMware ACE Management Server Administrator's Manual

ACE Management Server Administrator's Manual

Prepare Custom Security Certificates

To use custom SSL certificates, either your own self‐signed certificates or those of a third‐party or internal CA
(certificate authority), you must provide the certificate, key, and (in the case of CAs) certificate chain files.
These files must be PEM encoded.
After you create or obtain these files, upload them to ACE Management Server by using the Custom SSL
Certificates tab in the ACE Management Server Setup application.
For more information about how VMware ACE uses SSL certificates, see "Using SSL Certificates and Protocol"
on page 18.
To prepare custom security certificates
1 Create or provide the needed files:

For your own self‐signed certificate, use the openssl utility to create a new self‐signed certificate.

For a third‐party CA or internal CA, obtain an SSL certificate signed by that CA, and a
certificate‐verification chain file.
The chain file is a concatenation of every certificate required to verify the new SSL certificate you
created or obtained. Steps for obtaining the certificate chain vary, depending on which host operating
system you are using and on the source from which the CA certificate is obtained.

A private‐key file. SSL encrypts data through the use of a public‐key and private‐key pair. The public
key is known to everyone and the private key is known only to the message recipient.
The certificate signatures must use the SHA1 algorithm digest. The files must be PEM‐encoded.
2 Rename the files, as follows:

Rename the private key file to server.key.

Rename the certificate file to server.crt.

Rename the certificate chain file to chain.crt.
You can now use the ACE Management Server Setup application to upload the certificate files.

View the Properties of the Self-Signed Certificate File

This file is stored in the SSL directory in the VMware ACE Management Server program directory.
To view the properties of the self-signed certificate file
Do one of the following:

On a Windows host, navigate to the location of the server.crt file and double‐click the file name.

On a Linux host, use the following command:
openssl x509 -in /var/lib/vmware/acesc/ssl/server.crt -text
To replace an expired certificate, see "Prepare Custom Security Certificates" on page 34. Do not modify
certificates to make them permanent.

Starting ACE Management Server Configuration

If you plan to use Active Directory integration (using LDAP), an external database, or custom SSL certificates,
you must perform some setup tasks before configuring the ACE Management Server. See "Prerequisites for
Configuring the Server" on page 29.
34 VMware, Inc.