I am setting up a custom monitoring system (must use open source solution). I have a Python script that queries an ESXi instance (directly, not via vCenter or vRa) using the ESXi's implementation of the vSphere API to get health and status information. It works using a username and password, but I need to be able to authenticate using a certificate. I have a certificate (both public and private keys) for my environment. It is a situation where I have many ESXi instances to monitor and we want to use a single public/private certificate for all of them. Is API authentication possible using certs? If so, where does the public cert get installed on the ESXi instance? Does anyone have any sample Python scripts that access the ESXi API using cert based authentication (I'm using Python 2.7 with pyvmomi under CentOS 7)?
Ron