To establish a secure network connection to the vCloud Usage Meter Web interface, you must install a CA-signed SSL certificate on the vCloud Usage Meter appliance.
After you deploy vCloud Usage Meter, the appliance generates a self-signed SSL certificate. When you access the vCloud Usage Meter Web interface over HTTPS for the first time, you are prompted to manually trust the self-signed certificate.
You can secure the connection to vCloud Usage Meter by replacing the vCloud Usage Meter self-signed certificate with a CA-signed SSL certificate.
To obtain a CA-signed certificate and private key, you must generate a certificate signing request that is passed to the certificate authority to generate the official certificate.
Prerequisites
- You can log in to the to the vCloud Usage Meter console as usagemeter.
- You can log in to the to the vCloud Usage Meter console as root.
- From the certificate authority, obtain the usagemeter.key file containing the private key and the usagemeter.crt file containing the signed certificate. Both files must be in PEM format.
Procedure
- Log in to the vCloud Usage Meter console as usagemeter and enable SSH on the appliance.
- Start the SSHD service on the appliance by running the command.
su root -c "service sshd start"
- Copy the usagemeter.key and the usagemeter.crt files to the tmp folder on the vCloud Usage Meter console.
You can use a SCP software like WinSCP on Windows.
- Enter the conf folder.
cd /opt/vmware/cloudusagemetering/conf
- Create a nginx/ssl directory to store the private key and the signed certificate files.
mkdir nginx
mkdir nginx/ssl
- Move the private key and certificate files from the tmp folder to the nginx/ssl folder.
mv /tmp/usagemeter.crt nginx/ssl
mv /tmp/usagemeter.key nginx/ssl
- Configure restrictive permissions for both files.
- Create a backup copy of the nginx.conf file.
cp nginx.conf nginx.conf.bak
- Add the CA-signed certificates in the nginx.conf file.
- Open the nginx.conf file for editing.
- To add the certificate and the private key, edit the following entries.
ssl_certificate nginx/ssl/usagemeter.crt
ssl_certificate_key nginx/ssl/usagemeter.key
- Save the nginx.conf file.
- Using the vSphere Client (HTML5), reboot the vCloud Usage Meter virtual machine.
If the installation of the CA-signed SSL certificate on the
vCloud Usage Meter appliance is successful, no security warning is displayed the next time you log in to the
vCloud Usage Meter Web interface.