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Upgrade vCenter 5.1 to 5.5 error: "The existing ssl certificate is invalid"

The upgrade from vCenter Server 5.1 to vCenter Server 5.5 (5.5.0 and 5.5.0a) fails during the SSO installation with the following error message:

The existing ssl certificate is invalid

After verifying the certificate i could confirm that it is valid and not expired. After troubleshooting the update log I figured out that the problem was caused by a wrong registry entry. The old 5.1 installation was using an IP address instead of the vCenters FQDN.

Howto fix "The existing ssl certificate is invalid" error message during SSO Update

  1. Press Start -> Run...
  2. Type regedit and click OK
  3. Navigate to
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware Infrastructure\SSOServer\
  4. Edit the Key FQDNIP to reflect the vCenter Server FQDN
  5. Remove the folder CIS located at %ProgramData%\Vmware\
  6. Restart vCenter Server Services

The upgrade should now succeed without the invalid certificate error message.

 

4 thoughts on “Upgrade vCenter 5.1 to 5.5 error: "The existing ssl certificate is invalid"”

  1. I to reflect the vCenter Server FQDN ,and restart server but I have still the same problem.
    The second issue is that I don't have a folder CIS located at %ProgramData%\Vmware\

  2. I agree with Jarek. I performed these steps and was ot able to move forward. I am still receiving the same error message.

  3. I had this issue. For me it turns out that the issue was that the FqdnIp was set to 127.0.0.1. It apparently doesn't like this. I changed it to the IP address of the server and tried the updater again. This time it worked.

    As the other commenters have stated, i didn't have any CIS folder and I did not have to restart any services. Just changed the FqdnIp registry key to the non-localhost IP of the server and relaunched the update process.

  4. i followed the same step instead of FQDN IP, I tried to insert the hostname instead of IP of and installation succeded

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