After attempting to login to vCenter web client, browser just shows a 'white screen'.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

After attempting to login to vCenter web client, browser just shows a 'white screen'. All vCenter services are running. 

/var/log/vmware/vsphere-ui/logs/vsphere_client_virgo.log shows: 
[2026-02-11T14:24:04.463Z] [ERROR] p-nio-127.0.0.1-5090-exec-40 70001886 100137 ###### com.vmware.vise.security.spring.DefaultAuthenticationProvider     Authentication failure com.vmware.vise.security.spring.DefaultAuthenticationException: ssoFault=Cannot connect to vCenter Single Sign-On server http://localhost:1080/external-vecs/http1/<VC_FQDN>/443/sts/STSService/vsphere.local.

 

Environment

vCenter Server 8.x

Cause

The STS certificate is signed by a VMCA or otherwise different CA than the VC machine cert and solution user certs. 
This can happen if the VMCA is regenerated using vCert or certificate-manager - and a follow up to regenerate STS certificate was not done. 

 

Resolution

Re-generate the STS certificate using the VMCA. 
You can use vCert to accomplish this. See: vCert