Managing Certificates in VMware Cloud Foundation

You can use the SDDC Manager UI to manage certificates in a VMware Cloud Foundation instance, including integrating a certificate authority, generating and submitting certificate signing requests (CSR) to a certificate authority, and downloading and installing certificates.

This section provides instructions for using either:

• OpenSSL as a certificate authority, which is a native option in SDDC Manager.
• Integrating with Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services.
• Providing signed certificates from another external Certificate Authority.

You can manage the certificates for the following components.

• vCenter Server
• NSX Manager
• SDDC Manager
• VxRail Manager
• VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle
  Note: Use VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle to manage certificates for the other VMware Aria Suite components.

You replace certificates for the following reasons:

• A certificate has expired or is nearing its expiration date.
• A certificate has been revoked by the issuing certificate authority.
• You do not want to use the default VMCA-signed certificates.
• Optionally, when you create a new workload domain.

It is recommended that you replace all certificates after completing the deployment of the VMware Cloud Foundation management domain. After you create a new VI workload domain, you can replace certificates for the appropriate components as needed.