Prior to vCloud director installation you need to generate SSL certificates for your http and console-proxy connections. You can also you certificates purchased from certificate issuing company if you are planning to use your vCloud environment over the internet.

I am using self-signed certificates in my Home Lab and instructions for how to generate the certificates I have covered in my earlier post

When vCloud installer is run it invokes a script to configure the vCloud director and in the process it asks for the path to the certificates which will be used in securing the http and console-proxy connections.

I have generated the certificate (vcd.ks) on my root partition as visible in below screenshot.

Now when I executed the vCloud installer (vcloud-director.bin file) it invoked a script for configuring the vCloud setup and was asking for the path to the certificate. I entered /root/vcd.ks but the installer was throwing an error that “file could not be found”.

This was surprising as there can’t be any issues regarding the permission as I was login using root user account which has super administrator privilege in the system. So I was scratching my head why it is not able to read the certificate file from /root partition.

I even tried moving my certificate to some other location and then providing the full path of certificate to the installer but still no luck. I was getting frustrated. Then I realized that the installer script is trying to search my certificate file in vcloud director directory (/opt/vmware/vcloud-director). I opened a new putty session to my server and copied the vcd.ks file in the /opt/vmware/vcloud-director folder.

[root@vcd~]# cd /opt/vmware/vcloud-director

[root@vcd~]# cp /root/vcd.ks  .

Now when I provided the certificate name to the installer it accepted it and asked for the password created for certificate file.

Duh!!! Finally resolved. Still that question is haunting me why the installer did not accepted the /root path of my certificate.