VSAN Part 28 – RVC login difficulties

It’s interesting how a number of conversations tend to pop up around the same issue in a short space of time. I read a very interesting thread from one of our support guys recently about trying to select the correct administrator credentials for the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC). RVC is a command line utility to manage various aspects of vSphere and has been extended to include VSAN functionality. The following day, I saw a thread on the VSAN forums for exactly the same thing – a customer experiencing difficultly logging into RVC on a remote vCenter server as administrator. The bottom line is that the RVC credentials are directly related to the default domain setting in SSO (Single Sign-On). As I said, this boils down to the default domain setting in SSO. To check the current settings, login to the web client as administrator@vsphere.local, navigate to Administration > Single Sign-On > Configuration > Identity Sources. There you will see entries for the vsphere.local domain, the Local OS and Active Directory if it is configured. One of these will be the default, and this has a direct bearing on which administrator password should be passed to RVC when attempting to login.

In the example shown here, Local OS is the default domain, so when someone initiates RVC, the “local” administrator password which should be provided. If vsphere.local was the default domain, then it is the administrator at vsphere.local that should be supplied. If AD was the default, then it is the domain\administrator password that should be supplied.

For example, if I wished to launch rvc as SSO admin on this localhost, I would have to provide syntax similar to:

administrator@vsphere.local@localhost

Should you wish to change the default domain, the icon consisting of a circle+arrow in the toolbar allows you to do that. And finally, if you are using the Local OS administrator, and Local OS is the default domain, but you get the following error message  when trying to login:

NoPermission: Permission to perform this operation was denied.

…ensure that the local administrator has administrator role assigned in vCenter.