A while ago I had to change a disk in a vSAN disk group and for some reason, the Physical Health view in vCenter showed the information of the old disk. A closer look told me that Health Monitoring was not enabled so I selected the cluster and looked at Configure, VxRail, Health Monitoring. Health Monitoring was indeed disabled. So I enabled it.

But after a few moments, I noticed that it was disabled again. Huh?

When I opened the VxRail plugin in vCenter I saw a warning that the password for the management account was expired. So I reset the password of that user in vCenter and changed the password through the interface. See this article from Dell.

But now I got a message saying the account was locked. So I unlocked it. But after a few moments… locked again. So for some reason, the password was not updated.

You can also change the password through the console. Open the console of the VxRail Management VM and log in as root. First, check the status of the current account.

curl --unix-socket /var/lib/vxrail/nginx/socket/nginx.sock -X GET 'http://localhost/rest/vxm/internal/lockbox/v1/credentials?lockbox_name=SYSTEM&credential_names=management_account_vc'|jq

Expired is not good so I wanted to change the password. The command for changing the password needs a password that is Base64 encoded. So run this command:

echo -n 'Type plain text PW here' | base64

And finally, change the password with this command:

curl -X PUT --unix-socket /var/lib/vxrail/nginx/socket/nginx.sock -H "accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"lockbox_name":"SYSTEM","credentials":[{"credential_name":"management_account_vc","username":"VC management account user name","password":"Insert encoded PW here"}]}' 'http://localhost/rest/vxm/internal/lockbox/v1/credentials [localhost]';

You can use the first command again to check the account status. After the change, I did restart vmware-marvin and runjars (systemctl restart) but when I enabled Health Monitoring it stays enabled. And, more importantly, the disk information is now up-to-date.