When deploying an OVA in vSphere 8, it is not uncommon for the workflow to flag the OVA publisher certificate as untrusted. This can be a significant issue for organizations that prioritize security. In this blog post, I will cover how to overcome this issue.

The Problem

Deploying an OVF Template/OVA is a common operation for a VMware Administrator. You right-click on the ESX Cluster or an ESX host in the inventory browser and click Deploy OVF Template. This action initiates the Deploy OVF Template workflow. Typically, there are ten steps to this workflow. The first three steps ask for:

I recently wrote about a little issue where I had to quickly get my lab hosts and vCenter upgraded to vSphere 7.0U3k luckily vSphere Lifecycle Manager saved me. During that process I discovered in vCenter there are a bunch of API calls you can make directly from the CLI once you SSH into vCenter.

Recently, I ran into an issue where I really needed to get my vSphere homelab upgraded to version 7.0U3k. More on why this was so urgent in a future post. However, I was still back on 7.0U3d. To get to 7.0U3 I used vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM). In case you missed it, vSphere Lifecycle Manager is built into vSphere 7.