Error: Invalid Organization Name when generating CSR in VMware Live Site Recovery VAMI

Products

• VMware Site Recovery Manager

Issue/Introduction

When attempting to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) from the VMware Live Site Recovery (VLSR) VAMI interface, the operation fails.

• VAMI UI displays error: "Invalid Organization name".
• Issue occurs when the Organization Name field contains a comma or any other unacceptable character (e.g., "Company, Inc.").
• CLI-generated CSRs may be rejected by the CA if hidden spaces or word-wrap characters are present in the command string.
  

Environment

• VMware Live Site Recovery (All Versions)

Cause

The VLSR VAMI UI currently uses a regular expression for the Organization Name field that rejects commas. 

Resolution

1. Log in to the VLSR appliance via SSH as admin and sudo root account.
2. Generate the CSR and private key using OpenSSL. Ensure the command is typed directly to avoid hidden formatting characters
   

   openssl req -new -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout hostname.key -out hostname.csr -subj "/C=US/ST=State/L=Locality/O=Organization, Inc./OU=IT/CN=hostname"

3. Obtain the CSR file via WinSCP from the VLSR appliance
4. Submit the hostname.csr file to your Certificate Authority to obtain the signed certificate.
5. Relocate the generated private key to the internal VAMI configuration directory. Note: If the key is not in this directory, the VAMI CA upload with fail
   

   mv hostname.key /opt/vmware/etc/va-configurator/csrkey.pem

6. Log in to the VLSR VAMI and upload the CA-Signed certificate.
7. Refresh the browser to verify the new certificate is active.

Additional Information

This is planned on being fixed in a future release. 

See VLSR product release page for steps to download this release.

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See the following KB for additonal CA cert related installs on VLSR appliance.
Configuring CA signed certificates for VMware Live Site Recovery