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Avoid Certificate Warning on Windows Azure Pack Development Environment
Often, we spin up virtual machines for development & testing purposes of Windows Azure Pack (as part of Team Access Control Resource Provider or other engagements). Typically we develop against an express deployment. One of the very time consuming process during development is to click on ‘continue to this website’ from the certificate validation error message while accessing admin portal & tenant portal. Since the portal automatically redirect to the authentication site, it also prompts for the same, which adds to the pain. 😦
There are two issues with the self-signed certificate.
1. It is not trusted
2. The subject name do not match the website
I am providing how we fix this on our development environment. I suggest this to be only used for development / test environments.
Step 1: Create a self-signed certificate with subject name matching website
Step 2: Add the new certificate as a trusted certificate authority
Step 3: Update bindings for sites to use the generated certificate (MgmtSvc-AdminSite, MgmtSvc-AuthSite, MgmtSvc-TenantSite, MgmtSvc-WindowsAuthSite)
Step 4: Restart IIS & Browser
You can download the PowerShell script referred to in this blog post from here. Hope this helps in improving your productivity. 🙂
Server Roles and Features requirement for Windows Azure Pack
When we install express deployment using Web Platform Installer, it automatically configures all required Windows Server Roles & Features. However, in development environment where we want to build new WAPack virtual machine, it is always better to build the baseline image with all required roles and features.
You can find a reference server configuration file that I generated at Technet Gallery. You can use the following PowerShell scripts to configure server with the pre-requisites.
Using this approach brings down the configuration by Web PI from 53 components to 36 for WAPack UR4.
# If you want to generate the configuration based on an existing WAPack Server
# Get-WindowsFeature |
# ? { $_.Installed -AND $_.SubFeatures.Count -eq 0 } |
# Export-Clixml C:\WAPack_ServerRolesAndFeatures.xml
$serverFeatures = Import-Clixml C:\WAPack_ServerRolesAndFeatures.xml
foreach ($feature in $serverFeatures) { `
Install-WindowsFeature -Name $feature.name `
}
You can find software requirements for Windows Azure Pack express deployment here.
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