One of my weird hobbies is installing legitimate SSL certificates EVERYWHERE. Here’s steps for replacing the default self-signed garbage SSL certificates you get out of the box with VMware ESXi:

Steps

1. Get your SSL cert, obviously. You’ll need a .key file and a .crt. (If you need help at this stage, take a look at my SSL cert management scripts on github.)
2. Enable SSH access to your ESXi box. Login as root over ssh. (If you don’t know about this, perhaps this whole process is not for you at this time)
3. From your root ssh session to your ESXi box, follow these steps:
   
cd /etc/vmware/ssl
mv rui.crt orig.rui.crt
mv rui.key orig.rui.key

4. Use vi to open new rui.key and rui.crt files and paste in your own crt and key files.
5. Restart services so your certs are in-play:
   
/etc/init.d/hostd restart
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart


Read more “VMware ESXi 6.5 – Replacing the default SSL/TLS certificates”