Brownfield deployed hosts cannot be managed through SDDC Manager’s password rotation policy

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager

Issue/Introduction

In VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployments, users may observe that ESXi hosts are not visible under the password management section of SDDC Manager. As a result, these hosts cannot be managed through SDDC Manager’s password rotation.

Environment

VMware SDDC Manager 9.x

Cause

This issue occurs because the deployment is a brownfield deployment which involves integrating an existing vSphere environment into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

In a brownfield scenario, the infrastructure components (like ESXi hosts, vCenter, NSX, etc.) are already deployed and configured before being imported into VCF. Since SDDC Manager did not originally provision or manage these ESXi hosts, it does not maintain full lifecycle control, including password management capabilities.
In VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployments, users may observe that ESXi hosts are not visible under the password management section of SDDC Manager. As a result, these hosts cannot be managed through SDDC Manager’s password rotation or policy enforcement features.

Resolution

This is expected behavior by design. For brownfield deployments, SDDC Manager does not support password management (rotation or policy enforcement) for ESXi hosts that were not provisioned via the SDDC bring-up workflow.

Recommendations:

VCF Workload Domains (Greenfield): For full lifecycle and password management via SDDC Manager, ensure that hosts are deployed through the VCF greenfield deployment process where SDDC Manager provisions and owns the infrastructure components.