In this post I will explain how to connect your XenDesktop 7 deployment to a vCenter environment which doesn’t use any third party certificates for it’s SSL authentication.  If you attempt to make the connection it will fail as the certificate is not trusted. What you need to do is import the certificate onto your XenDesktop server so that it is trusted. If you do not do this you will receive the following error:

“Cannot connect to the VCenter server due to a certificate error. Make sure that the appropriate certificates are installed on the VCenter server, and install the appropriate certificates on the same machine that contains all instances of the Host service”

So to make the connection successful we can follow the following steps:

1) Export the certificate from your vCenter server and call it whatever you like. Once you have done this copy it onto your XenDesktop server

2) Double click on the certificate and verify the details.  It should say “Issued to VMware default certificate” If so select “Install Certificate”

3) The Certificate Import Wizard will start up. For the store location select “Local Machine”

4)  When prompted for which certificate store you want the certificate in, let the wizard place it automatically.

5) Now that the certificate is in the store our SSL connection should be trusted.  We can now proceed to enter our connection details:

Note the address needs to match exactly what was on the “Issued By” field on the certificate otherwise this process will fail.

6) If the connection was successful then you will be displayed with all your resources in vCenter. You can now proceed with setting up the rest of the connection properties 🙂