I recently set up VDP6 in my home lab, and during the setup,
chose to register with vSphere using the in-built root@vsphere.local account.
I made an incorrect assumption that this credential was only used to create a VDP system account in the SSO domain - turns out I was wrong!
This was all working fine until I SSH’d into the vCenter Appliance
and was prompted to change my password, which I did.
That night, all of my backups failed with the VDP error “VDP:
Failed to attach disk” (seen in the Task Failures section of the Reports tab in
the VDP GUI of the vSphere web client).
I tried rebooting the VDP appliance, but after that I could
no longer connect to the VDP admin page in the vSphere Web Client.
Going into the VDP config page on port 8543 showed further
issues – no proxies were listed, and the Storage tab could not display Capacity
Utilization.
The fix was to go into the VDP Configuration page (https://<VDP IP OR
HOSTNAME>:8543/vdp-configure), then click on the settings icon to the right
of VDP Appliance (on the Configration tab), and choose “vCenter registration”.
Going through the wizard and entering the new root password
fixed everything with no reboots.
Despite the error about losing jobs etc, as I did not change
the vCenter hostname, the jobs survived, and I was able to run them
successfully after waiting for the vCenter “Reconfiguring VDP” Tasks completed.
If you regularly need to change the root password, I suppose
the correct fix would be to create a vSphere\SSO account just for use by the
VDP service, and re-register using this account.
