pki

This is the first article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model. Simple vCAC deployment In a simple installation you have the Identity Appliance, the vCAC appliance (which includes a vPostgres DB and vCenter Orchestrator instance) and an IaaS server. The distributed model still has a single Identity Appliance but clusters 2 or more vCAC appliances behind a load balancer, backed by a separate vPostgres database appliance.

There are different schools of thought as to whether you should have SSH enabled on your hosts. VMware recommend it is disabled. With SSH disabled there is no possibility of attack, so that’s the “most secure” option. Of course in the real world there’s a balance between “most secure” and “usability” (e.g. the most secure host is powered off and physically isolated from the network, but you can’t run any workloads ).

I learned something new today: SCOM 2007 R2 certificate based communications not only checks the validity of the certificate you use, but also the CA that issued it…let me expand: Like many organisations there is a root CA (we’ll call it ROOTCA01), and then a subordinate CA (we’ll call that SUBCA01). OPSMGM01 has a certificate to identify itself and has certificates for ROOTCA01 and SUBCA01 in it’s Trusted Root Certificate Authorities.