What is a PEM file?
One of the most widely used features of our Load Balancer is the ability to offload SSL traffic by terminating HTTPS connections on the balancer itself. This has a variety of benefits including; centralized certificate management, offloading CPU intensive decryption/encryption tasks from your webservers and enabling the balancer to make complex layer-7 routing decisions on encrypted workloads.
The balancer requires the certificates be in the .pem format. A PEM is essentially just the certificate, key, as well as any intermediate certificates (if required) all combined into a single file.
You can simply combine all of these into a single file with the extension .pem
Creating your PEM file
It should look something like this:
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
(REQUIRED: Your Private Key: website.key)
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
(REQUIRED: Your Primary SSL certificate: website.crt)
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
(OPTIONALLY: Your Intermediate certificate: NetworkSolutions_CA.crt)
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
(OPTIONALLY: Your Root certificate: TrustedRoot.crt)
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
You can test your SSL install with our free tool.