An administrator must replace a component’s certificate in VCF with an external CA-signed certificate.

The VCF 9.0 Security and Certificates Guide states: “VCF supports only certificates in PEM format when replacing system component certificates with those signed by an external Certificate Authority.”

PEM is the standard Base64 format with .crt and .key files. PFX (PKCS#12) is used for Windows stores but not supported in VCF automation. P7B is for certificate chains, while DER is binary encoding. Thus, the required format for certificates in VCF is PEM.