(I may as well do something useful with this blog like add content Google can index to help people solve the same problems I’ve encountered in my day to day work.)

So we run Dell EqualLogic arrays at work and I’ve had a problem getting the storage provider to register with the VMware VASA service.

The Dell EqualLogic Virtual Storage Manager appliance (4.0.1) would hang with the message:
Waiting for VMware vCenter to register with the VASA Provider

After much troubleshooting with Dell ProSupport we found the issue was related to expired certificates in the Java services used by VMware.

There are two knowledge base articles you should refer to confirm and fix this problem.

DELL: in VSM prior to 4.0.1 there was a certificate distributed as part of the included JDK that expired in 2013.
Dell released a knowledge base article on how to fix this.
VSM fails to register with the VASA service on vCenter

In my case, is was the certificate on the VMware side that was expired. When looking in the VSM logs, the engineer only had the certificate date to go by as the name was not listed.
This matched the expired certificate we found when following the VMware knowledge base article on the issue.
Registering a VASA provider with vCenter Server fails and reports the error: InvalidCertificate (2079087)

Bug: The Dell VSM appliance doesn’t timeout or fail if it can’t register with VASA. It remains stuck in a retry loop. Ctl+C does stop it and show a failed message and point to a log file. However VASA is then reported as SET in the VSM console.
Hopefully this is fixed in future releases

Bug: Expired VMware certificate. I don’t believe I missed anything in the upgrade documentation whilst upgrading vCenter from 5.0 to 5.1 then 5.5 over the last 18 months.
Should VMware have flagged this during these processes or updated this certificate?