QuickTip: Manually trigger certificate renewal on Avi Controller/NSX ALB

Avi Controller (or NSX Advanced Load Balancer, as known now) is able to automatically run scripts to renew your certificates your Virtual Services use – this is done by such called Certificate Management and ControlScript.

The certificate renewal is, by default, triggered 7 days before the certificate expiry. Or to be more exact, just right before the penultimate certificate expiry notification as configured on your controller. For more information see Avi’s documentation for "Customizing Notification of Certificate Expiration" here.

Why?

This functionality is also great for using the free, well-known certificate authority Let’s Encrypt. I’m currently working on quite some improvements to the Let’s Encrypt script for Avi Controller and manually triggering the renewal process makes testing just so much easier.

Right to the magic

1. Login to your Avi Controller/NSX ALB via SSH using admin (or any other user having permissions to login via SSH)

2. Then type shell to open and login into Avi’s custom shell:

   admin@avicontroller:~# shell
   Login: admin
   Password:

3. Then you can use the renew command to trigger certificate renewal manually just like this:

   [admin:avicontroller.]: > renew sslkeyandcertificate patrik.kernstock.net\ ECDSA
   Certificate Renewed
   STDOUT -
   Running version 0.9.0
   Debug enabled.
   dry_run is: False
   disable_check is: False
   directory_url is https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
   Reusing account key.
   Parsing account key...
   Parsing CSR...
   Found domains: patrik.kernstock.net
   [...]

Tip: You can also type renew sslkeyandcertificate and TAB to autocomplete the names for you.

Thanks to Nikhil from Avi Engineering team for bringing this to my attention! That’s really handy.