A few years ago I wrote a blog post about “Replacing vCenter with vSAN Encryption Enabled“. For this particular exercise, one key piece of information needed to be retrieved was the kmipClusterId.

A couple of things have changed since then, in newer version of vSAN.

Change #1: ESXCLI commands

An easier way to retrieve this information with esxcli command was added. This command allows you to obtain a lot of information about the state of vSAN encryption, retrieve the hostKeyId, kekID, etc.

esxcli vsan encryption <option> get/list

 

So, based on this addition, you can now get the kmipClusterId needed for vCenter replacement by using esxcli vsan encryption kms list

As you can see, you can still look for this information on the esx.conf file which is where the hosts store this information for this particular version of vSAN (6.7 P01 – Build 15160138). Which brings me to the second update…

 

Change #2: vSAN Persistence

In vSAN 7.0 and beyond some changes were made on how this configuration gets stored. In this case, the encryption information that was previously file based (esx.conf) is now stored in a database. This provides better concurrency for multiple readers and writers versus the file based esx.conf option, among other advantages.

The good news is that the esxcli vsan encryption command will still allow you to retrieve the information needed in regards to encryption. However, if you attempt to retrieve this information from the esx.conf file, you won’t be able to find it there anymore.

Alternatively, you can retrieve the information directly from the config-store… maybe more info than you need. So, I’ld just stick to esxcli commands.