The certificate could not be deleted from cloud service XXX

Question

I'm trying to remove a certificate (via the Management Portal) that is due to expire on 16/07/2014 days and I'm getting this error:

The certificate I'm trying to delete was automatically generated 'CN=Windows Azure Tools' and was used for Remote Access.

I also tried to configure the cloud services to use new certificates, but still no success.

Looked at Fiddlers log and indeed there in an internal server error:

My questions are:

1. Is there any way I can delete this certificate?
2. If I can't delete it, what happens when it expires?

What I really want to avoid is to have to redeploy the production services because of this certificate.

Answer 1

Florin, you cannot delete a certificate in production use, but you have two options for this issue:

1. The easiest option is to just ignore it. The RDP cert is only used for password encryption and it doesn't matter if the cert is expired or not since Azure does not check the expiration date when doing the encryption/decryption.
2. You can upload a new certificate and then modify the RDP configuration to use that new certificate. After this you can delete the old certificate. This is essentially the same process you would use for an HTTPS certificate.