Next up in our series of VMware View topics, we’re going to talk about security. I spoke with a couple of our top support engineers about View security and they identified three Knowledgebase articles that solve more support requests than any others in the area of security, namely SSL certificates. They recommend customers use:
In View 5.1 and later, you configure certificates for View by importing the certificates into the Windows local computer certificate store on the View server host. By default, clients are presented with this certificate when they visit a secure page such as View Administrator. You can use the default certificate for lab environments, and one could even make the argument that it is OK for fire-walled environments, but otherwise you should replace it with your own certificate from a trusted CA (Verisign, GoDaddy, others) as soon as possible. They also told me you should use an SSL certificate from a trusted CA when setting up a Security Server for your environment when the Security Server can be used from outside your firewall (Internet) to access View desktops inside your firewall.
My engineers stressed to me the importance of following each step in these KBs one at a time when you are filling out the forms on those sites to obtain your certificate. It is easy to make a mistake and you might not receive something that will work for you.
Note: The default certificate is not signed by a commercial Certificate Authority (CA). Use of noncertified certificates can allow untrusted parties to intercept traffic by masquerading as your server.
