In my current role I’m responsible for evanglelising a number of VMware solutions, from Horizon View to vRealize Automation and everything in between. A large number of these can be secured with genuine SSL certificates from an in-house Certificate Authority, even in a lab environment. However provisioning a CA in that environment can sometimes be difficult. A number of decisions have to be made:

• Windows or Linux?
• If Windows, Enterprise or Standalone?
• One, two or three tier?

As a lot of organisations use Windows, setting up a 2008 or 2012 Certificate Services environment is often the easy option. Depending on the choices made, this can often be a complex process.

This got me thinking, what if there was an easier way? What if new technologies such as containers and DevOps could help?

In my next series, I aim to show how to setup a two-tier OpenSSL Certificate Authority using Docker to issue SSL certificates for a wide range of VMware environments. And to save you from having to reinvent the wheel, I’ll make it available on my Docker Hub and GitHub pages.

Stay tuned!