Configuring a central certificate store

If you host multiple secure servers at the internet scale, you may find that certificate management can be challenging. Each time you add a new IIS host into your infrastructure, you need to ensure that all of the correct certificates are in place on that host and the correct web binding (binding the certificates to IIS) is in place for each secure site. To add to the workload, you need to deal with certificate expiration and the renewal of certificates across each IIS server that utilizes those certificates.

Windows 2019 includes a feature, the Central Certificate Store (CCS), that simplifies managing certificates. With CCS, you store certificates in a central location, such as on an SMB file share, and use IIS to load certificates from the central CCS share.

In this recipe, you configure SRV1 to use a new share on DC1, which holds the CCS SMB share. You create the certificate store, create a new certificate for SRV1, and move that certificate to the...