HTTPS Certificate Configuration (Version 3.x and earlier)

Note: Article about Proxmox VE 2.0

HTTPS Certificate Configuration

This is a mini-howto for changing the web server certificate in Proxmox, so that you can have a certificate created with a custom CA. It has been tested on a Proxmox 2.1 installation.

3 files are needed:

• ca.crt  : CA certificate file in PEM format
• server.key : non-password protected private key
• server.pem : server certificate from CA in PEM format

You can create the previous files following any standard openssl certificate generation HOWTO.

1. Backup PVE created files

cp /etc/pve/pve-root-ca.pem   /etc/pve/pve-root-ca.pem.orig
cp /etc/pve/pve-www.pem       /etc/pve/pve-www.pem.orig
cp /etc/pve/local/pve-ssl.key /etc/pve/local/pve-ssl.key.orig
cp /etc/pve/local/pve-ssl.pem /etc/pve/local/pve-ssl.pem.orig
       

2. Copy your own certificates

cp server.key /etc/pve/pve-www.pem
cp server.key /etc/pve/local/pve-ssl.key
cp server.pem /etc/pve/local/pve-ssl.pem
cp ca.crt     /etc/pve/pve-root-ca.pem
       

3. Reload apache config

/etc/init.d/apache reload
       

That's it. It is important to change /etc/pve/pve-www.pem and /etc/pve/pve-root-ca.pem because otherwise VM console won't load due to a Java cert validation error.

If you have a Promox cluster, this has to be done on all nodes. To test the changes in one node before changing configuration in other nodes, please make sure you log in the web interface in the correct node.