vRA and vRO Connection Issue After vCenter Certificate Replacement

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 Hi Team,

In this blog, I would like to share my real-time experience and troubleshooting steps after replacing certificates in vCenter Server, which caused connectivity issues with both VMware Aria Automation (vRA) and vRealize Orchestrator (vRO).


Environment Issue

After updating the vCenter Server certificate in our infrastructure, the integrations with:

  • VMware Aria Automation (vRA)
  • VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO)

stopped working properly due to certificate trust issues.


Issue 1 – vRA Cloud Account Connection Failure

After the vCenter certificate replacement, the connection between vRA and vCenter was broken.


Validation Steps in Aria Automation

To validate the issue:

  1. Logged in to Aria Automation
  2. Navigated to:
    • Infrastructure → Connections → Cloud Accounts
  3. Selected the affected vCenter Cloud Account
  4. Re-entered the required credentials/details
  5. Accepted the newly updated vCenter certificate

After accepting the updated certificate, the connection between vRA and vCenter started working successfully again.


Issue 2 – vRO vCenter Connection Failure

Even after fixing the vRA connection, the vRO integration with vCenter was still not working.

Validation in vRO

To troubleshoot:

  1. Logged in to vRealize Orchestrator
  2. Navigated to:
    • Inventory → vSphere vCenter Server
  3. Checked the vCenter connection status

The following error was observed:


Error: unusable: com.vmware.cim.vmomi.core.exception.CertificateValidationException:
Server certificate assertion not verified and thumbprint not matched



This clearly indicated a certificate thumbprint mismatch after replacing the vCenter certificate.


Solution

To resolve the issue:

  1. Navigated to:
    • Workflows → Library → vCenter → Configuration
  2. Executed the workflow:
    • “Update a vCenter Server Instance”
  3. Selected the affected vCenter instance
  4. Accepted and updated the new vCenter certificate


Once the workflow completed successfully:

  • vRO trusted the new vCenter certificate
  • Inventory synchronization between vRO and vCenter started working successfully again


Key Takeaways

  • Replacing vCenter certificates impacts integrated VMware products such as:
    • Aria Automation
    • vRealize Orchestrator
  • vRA requires manual certificate acceptance in Cloud Accounts
  • vRO requires updating the vCenter instance using the built-in workflow
  • Certificate thumbprint mismatches are expected after vCenter certificate replacement


Further Automation

If you need enhancements or additional automation features, feel free to reach out. HashtagForge

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