VMware: New VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 4

As many people on the VM-Planet already blogged about this, I ain’t gonna write just about it. Let’s turn the clock back a few months, to January 2008.

As the institution I work for, is part of the DFN we took the opportunity to be a part of the “I want you to run our RA“-gang. In January 2008 we thought about changing the vCenter certificate. Now, apparently there’s a slight difference between the DFN-PCA and what VMware considers common practice.

The DFN-PCA states, that only CSR’s with a key length of 2048 bits are allowed (as outlined in 6.1.5 of the DFN-PKI Certificate Policy). Now VMware apparently didn’t actually think customers would use this “feature” (that is changing the SSL certificates).

Customization Specifications Created in Previous Releases Can Be Used in VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 4 to Clone or Deploy Virtual Machine with Customized Guest Operating Systems
This release resolves an issue where, if you clone or deploy a virtual machine using a customization specification that was created prior to upgrading the VirtualCenter, the VirtualCenter Server might display the error message The VirtualCenter server is unable to decrypt the passwords stored in the customization specification in the following scenarios:

  1. VirtualCenter Server is uninstalled first, and then re-installed and/or upgraded afterwards.
  2. Custom SSL certificate are deployed, but the instruction in http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_vcserver_certificates.pdf are not followed in a verbatim manner.

Well, and apparently it ain’t fixed yet. At least not for us 😕