Glenn posited an interesting question this morning…how to change the SSL certificate that VSC uses to one that is signed by your CA so that the warning(s) would no longer appear. Turns out it’s significantly more difficult that it probably should be, but it is possible.

First, let me say that NetApp probably hates me doing this and will not support your VSC install in anyway should you modify the key. Also, keep in mind that any updates to VSC may over write the key, thus undoing any of this work. So, proceed at your own risk…

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First let me say, I love VCS, it took all of the complexity out of using NetApp storage in a vSphere environment.  I have been tolerating one annoyance for quite some time now, and this morning said annoyance broke VCS at a customer site. What’s wrong with VCS? Well, for some reason it forces you to register the plugin with vCenter using an IP address.  Due to an over-restrictive proxy configuration, which caused only fully qualified domain names(FQDN) worked. Any IP address was redirected to an web page that explained said over-restricted policy, because VCS is mainly a web page the use of an IP address broke everything.  I searched around a little, and found Williams Lams post on removing plug-ins with the MOB. Once I found the pivot point for Plug-ins, I searched the API Reference, and found the ExtensionManager object.   Now that I had the Object in hand, I fired up PowerCLI and in less than 10 min figured out how to manually adjust the URL VSC used. It was so easy that I think I’m going to try and slap together a quick module to manage plug-ins via PowerCLI, but in the meantime if you, like me, have been frustrated by VSCs use of an IP address… try this.

$URL = 'https://VCS.getadmin.local:8143/vSphereExtensionDescriptor.xml'
# Get the Service Instance..
$SI = Get-View serviceinstance
# Get the extension manager
$ExtensionManager = get-view $SI.Content.ExtensionManager
# filter for the NetApp VSC extention
$extention = $ExtensionManager.ExtensionList |
    Where-Object {$_.key -eq 'com.netapp.nvpf'}
# Change the URL to use a FQDN vice an IP address
$extention.Client[0].url = $URL
# Save our updated extention!
$ExtensionManager.UpdateExtension($extention)

~Glenn

Being a primarily NetApp shop I do a fair amount of testing against their simulator before using any of the perl (and slowly PoSH) scripts against production systems. One of the things that I did a while ago was create a simple way of having the simulator(s) start when my virtual machine starts so that I don’t have to worry about logging in to start it.

NetApp’s documentation for the simulator states two ways of having it start when the server does: using screen to start it in the background, and the more “brute force” method of simply backgrounding the process when it’s started (by appending an ampersand to the end of the command). While both of these methods work, I wanted a way that I didn’t have to login to the system first in order to access the console of the simulator.

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