SOLVED: What Happens After an ESX vCenter Certificate Expires & How to Renen ESX Cert

The reason you have an ESX certificate on your ESX host is to allow it to securely communicate with your vCenter Server which manages all of the ESX hosts. Those certificates however will expire and VMware recommends that any certificate set to expire within six months should be replaced with a new certificate so that you don’t end up with communication problems.

After an ESX certificate expires vCenter may not be able to communicate with it from the browser. That means you might have to browse to the ESX host node directly, or use vCenter CLI (Command Line) to manage it.

If you connect to the ESX host server before a certificate expires you will see a line at the top of the certificate section indicating that this server is managed by vCenter and so you have to make changes to the certificate from vCenter.

You can easily rewew an expiring certificate:

1. Log into your vSphere
2. Select Administration > Certificates > Certificate Management
3. Click the ACTIONS drop down and select RENEW