Problem while Connecting Horizon 7.12 to vCenter

I was setting up a quick Horizon 7.12 PoC environment and ran into a bit of trouble getting Horizon to talk to vCenter.  Every time I tried to add the vCenter server to the Horizon environment, I got an error: "Certificate validation failed" and gave me no option to accept the certificate.  This was more than a little confusing because the vCenter server had a proper certificate signed by the enterprise CA and we verified that our Connection Server, as a domain member, trusted that CA and could even browse to vCenter via the web browser with no certificate issues.

So, I did what we all do in this sort of situation; I started digging through the the logs.  Eventually, I found the line that I needed in the C:\programdata\vmware\vdm\logs\debug-<date>.txt log file on the Connection Server (after searching for my vCenter server's name to help narrow down the contents of the log): "Permission to perform this operation was denied."

Well, that struck me as interesting.  Does Horizon keep its own trusted certificate authority list, I wondered.  What more permissions could it possibly need to interact with this hypothetical CA list?  But then I got to thinking that maybe that whole certificate validation error message was a false positive, and maybe something else went wrong and it just so happened to be near the phase when certificates are being checked...

So I took a look at the permissions on the vCenter server for our service account.  Whoops, we'd forgotten to actually assign it a role in vCenter!  Well, that was an embarrassing mistake.  I went ahead and gave the account permissions to access vCenter, then wouldn't you know it, but the next time we went to add the vCenter Server to the Horizon configuration it all went perfectly!

So, there you have it.  If you're getting that "Certificate validation failed" message when adding a vCenter server to Horizon, it might be worth double-checking that your service account has the access that you think it does!

Comments

Post a Comment

Sorry guys, I've been getting a lot of spam recently, so I've had to turn on comment moderation. I'll do my best to moderate them swiftly after they're submitted,

Popular posts from this blog

PowerShell Sorting by Multiple Columns

PowerShell's Sort-Object cmdlet is super useful, especially when preparing output for human consumption.  A few people have found my blog while looking for more information about its use, specifically while looking for how to sort by multiple columns (well, properties, technically).  I've never done so (much less written about it), so I hope those folks found answers elsewhere.  But, it got me curious... and it turns out that it's really easy. The Technet article on Sort-Object has the answer directly spelled out: just use commas to create a list of properties to sort by (in order to precedence).  Let's look at some examples!  First, prepare a variable with some good sortable data: $myData = get-eventlog System -newest 25 And then we can get to sorting!  Say you want to sort primarily by EntryType (Warning, Information, Error) and then by Source.  Easy-peasy: $myData | sort EntryType,Source How about if you want it to be in descending order?  Yeah, there&
Read more

Clone a Standard vSwitch from one ESXi Host to Another

One of my customers is standardizing the configurations on their HP C7000 enclosures (they've been set up at various sites by various administrators with varying involvement from the architecture team).  As such, we need to stand up some temporary resources so that we can take down the main enclosure for reconfiguration.  That's fine, we can easily ship a smaller enclosure to each site for temporary compute resources.  Some of the sites are using Standard vSwitches, so we need to be able to quickly copy the networking configuration over from their existing blades to these new, slightly different blades.  As I see it, we had 2 good options: 1) Capture a Host Profile with the desired vSwitch configuration.  Delete every other component of the Host Profile so that only the networking section is applied; design the new ESXi hosts so that the vSwitches'll work with the old vmnic-to-vswitch configurations. 2) Write a script to clone the vSwitch from ones ESXi host to another.
Read more

Deleting Orphaned (AKA Zombie) VMDK Files

A problem that most Virtualization Administrators need to deal with is Orphaned VMDK files (or Zombie VMDK files, as some people call them).  These are Virtual Machine hard drive files that are just hanging out, taking up storage, but are attached to no VMs.  How can this happen?  Well, the most common way is when an administrator needs to delete a VMDK but isn't quite ready to commit... so, after pressing "remove", they select "remove from virtual machine" rather than "remove and delete files".  The intent is always good: "I want to be able to restore this if it turns out to be necessary... so I'll just come back and delete it next week if nothing breaks!"  But, of course, next week something else happens and the file doesn't get deleted.  After a little while, it turns into "which files did I rename, again?" and nothing seems to happen. So, how do you deal with these orphaned files?  Well, a few years ago I found a scrip
Read more