Home > Servers > Systems Management > White Papers > Eliminate the need to schedule, track, and maintain SSL certificate renewals with new feature in iDRAC9 v4.0 > Removing the annoyance of SSL authentication renewal notices
Before iDRAC9 v4.0, keeping track of iDRAC SSL certificates required administrative overhead such as maintaining spreadsheets, setting reminders, or regularly checking the certificate authority. Once a server’s certificate was up for renewal, admins would still have to manually upload each one. Depending on the number of servers in your data center, the number of data centers your company has, and the validity period of your iDRAC SSL certificates, this could be a frequent annoyance to say the least.
iDRAC9 v4.0 automates the enrollment and renewal process so admins can maintain all of your company’s SLA security requirements without wasting time tracking certificates.
Getting iDRAC9 to automatically renew certificates required a couple of one-time setup processes: Setting up our environment for automatic renewals took 14 minutes and 47 seconds across 62 steps, while enabling Automatic Certificate Enrollment on a single server took 1 minute and 15 seconds across 5 steps. After this initial setup, however, an administrator wouldn’t need to do any work at all to keep certificates up to date in iDRAC9, no matter how often your company requires new certificates or how many servers need them.
By contrast, manually obtaining an SSL certificate took 1 minute and 48 seconds over 11 steps for one server. It doesn’t stop there, however—administrators would need to repeat these steps for each server, and repeat them again each time certificates require renewal. The ongoing time commitment inherent in manual certificate renewal can present a tedious annoyance to admins with more urgent business initiatives to attend to.
The size of the hassle grows with the size of your server infrastructure and the frequency of your renewals. By extrapolating the data we collected on a single server, we can see just how much time and effort your company can save with more servers:
Say your organization needs to renew SSL certificates for 1,000 servers every three months. Over three years, an admin at your company would spend 45 work days just renewing certificates. By enrolling your servers in automatic renewal, that administrator would save valuable time and avoid wasting effort on the 132,000 steps it would take to manually renew certificates—effort they could instead use for other high-value tasks. (Note that your results will vary based on the number of servers you have.)