How to move an SSL certificate between Exchange servers

In order to use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for secure communications between servers, a certificate provided by a valid certificate authority is required.

If you're creating a new instance of an Exchange server and want to use SSL on that new server as well, you'll need to move an existing SSL certificate to it.

One possible scenario involves promoting a back-end Exchange server to a front-end Exchange server -- the back-end server would need to have the front-end server's certificate loaded onto it.

The exact process for transferring a certificate isn't difficult, but there are complications that can arise due to the nature of SSL certification and server naming.

First, let's go over the process itself:

SSL should now be enabled on that computer.

When moving a certificate from machine to another in this fashion, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the name of the server -- i.e., the external fully-qualified domain name -- should be exactly the same for both servers.

If the certificate is tied to a specific machine name (the certificate's properties will tell you what the machine name is), and if it's using the server's internal BE name, then you'll need to make sure that any external DNS pointers are updated to indicate the new server.

Otherwise, people from the outside will never be able to access the newly certified server through SSL. Instead, they'll be redirected to the old machine. For external services that depend on SSL, like OWA, this is doubly important.

About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Power Users Newsletter.

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What if the internal domain name of the back-end server is different from the public domain name of t

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he front-end server?
—Jim H.

******************************************

If the servers do not have the same name, then I strongly suspect you cannot move the SSL certificate. You will probably need to generate a new SSL certificate for the back-end server, one with the proper name.

The best approach is to keep the SSL certificate on the front-end server and use RPC over HTTP (not HTTPS) to access the back-end server per Microsoft's article "How to configure the back-end server to act as a target for the RPC proxy server. "

The other approach is to generate a new SSL certificate specifically for the back-end server. Although -- from what I've read -- it's best to keep the SSL certificate on the front-end server, use RPC over HTTP to talk to the back-end server, and encrypt all traffic between the front-end and back-end servers using IPsec.

Exchange Server security expert Richard Luckett has another perspective on this issue via a slightly different topic: Securing a front-end certificate server.

I hope this helps!
—Serdar Yegulalp, tip author

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