How I made this work on vCenter 6.7

Excellent plugin, still today!

For those on vCenter 6.7 that replaced the VMA with MSW using https://github.com/T-M-D/MSW/blob/master/Deploy.md
and ran into error:

UNKNOWN: Server version unavailable at ‘https://xxx:443/sdk/vimService.wsdl’ at /usr/lib/perl5/5.10.0/VMware/VICommon.pm line 734

Security has been tightened in vCenter and and the VMA/MSW needs the vCenter root certificates to accept the SSL certificate from your vCenter server.
(On a side note I used Ubuntu 20 for the MSW, the CentOS I had issues getting all Perl modules to work/install).

on the vCenter server, on main website (enter only FQDN , without any /) , there is a “Download trusted root CA certificates”, save as ZIP.
Extract, put contents (a ‘certs’ folder) on your MSW. I chose /home/vi-admin as location.

Then on MSW server, set 2 environmental variables (HTTPS_CA_FILE and HTTPS_CA_DIR). Not sure both are needed but it works for me.
My vi-admin user is set to a /bin/bash shell (using: usermod –shell /bin/bash vi-admin) so my approach is putting the vars in user home dir .bashrc file:

$nano ~/.bashrc
export HTTPS_CA_FILE=’/home/vi-admin/certs/lin/96e3bd6f.0′
export HTTPS_CA_DIR=’/home/vi-admin/certs/lin’

And a test to see it works:

vi-admin@monitoring-msw1:~$ ~/box293_check_vmware.pl –server YOUR_VCENTER_FQDN_HERE –check vCenter_Name_Version
OK: VMware vCenter Server 6.7.0 build-17137327

then exit, back to the main monitoring server:

nagios@monitoring1:~$ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_by_ssh -E 1 -l vi-admin -H YOUR_MSW_IP_HERE -C “~/box293_check_vmware.pl –server YOUR_VCENTER_FQDN_HERE –check vCenter_Name_Version”
OK: VMware vCenter Server 6.7.0 build-17137327

More info:

https://code.vmware.com/docs/6530/vsphere-sdk-for-perl-installation-guide/doc/GUID-0F962FBE-A919-4997-9152-CA8D21AAC0DE.html
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2108416

MSW setup (Ubuntu 20):

cd /tmp
tar -xvzf VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-6.7.0-8156551.x86_64.tar.gz
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lib32z1 lib32ncurses6 build-essential uuid uuid-dev libssl-dev perl-doc libxml-libxml-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libsoap-lite-perl libmodule-build-perl
cd vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib/
cpan -i CPAN
cpan -i UUID
cpan -i Date::Format
./vmware-install.pl EULA_AGREED=yes
useradd vi-admin
passwd vi-admin
cd /home/
mkdir vi-admin
chown -R vi-admin:vi-admin vi-admin
usermod –shell /bin/bash vi-admin
chown vi-admin:vi-admin box293_check_vmware.pl

#fixing .ssh/authorized_keys – access & allowed key type:
chmod 700 .ssh
nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config #and insert: PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-dss