In this short post, we’ll discover how to retrieve passwords in VCF 9.0 using the VCF Operations Fleet Management Appliance UI.

As you know, we can see the password aliases in VCF Operations Fleet Management, but there is no way to see the actual passwords there.

But there is another way to retrieve the passwords, and this is through the VCF Fleet Management Appliance UI and/or its API.

In VCF 9.0 access to the VCF Fleet Management Appliance UI is disabled by default.

To enable the UI and Swagger API, we must SSH into the VCF Fleet Management Appliance as root user. There we execute the following command:

 touch /var/lib/vrlcm/UI_ENABLED

Now, we can login to the VCF Fleet Management Appliance UI using the admin@local user.

In the VCF Fleet Management Appliance UI click on the 9-dot icon on the top right side and click on Locker in the Services menu.

In the Locker click on Passwords. There we can view, edit and delete passwords. To view a password we click on the kebap icon on the right side of a password alias entry and click View Password.

To view the password we must provide the VCF Fleet Management Appliance root password.

To finally see the password in clear text, we click on the eye icon.

That’s all for now 😉