backup jobs failing after changing root password of vcenter

[squadri]

After changing the root password of vcenter appliance as required to do periodically, its noticed that backup jobs are failing to run successfully. Trying to edit the vcenter properties and apply the new root account credentials is not working. I was reading in a thread that it will require to run the wizard again!!! What about the existing backup jobs then?? will it continue to run or would need to reconfigure them all again!!??

All helpful ideas would be highly appreciated.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Syed.
"Edit vCenter server properties and apply new credentials" should work just fine if credentials are correct.
Existing backup jobs will be unaffected, if vCenter server is the same(only password has changed, right?) - that is you don't need to reconfigure them.
By the way, it is a good practice to create a special service account for Veeam(not root), and set granular permissions for it.
/Cheers!

[squadri]

Appreciate your prompt response and useful suggestion. Yes it did work after re-applying the credentials which seemingly failed earlier for unknown reason. Regarding creating a service account for veeam, it is required to be created in vcenter users ??? with the set granular permissions right?
Sounds a useful and pretty secure suggestion. Would try it out. Hope does not affect any jobs etc when root credentials are swapped with this special service veeam account.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Yes, account must be created at vSphere level and permissions shall be set on vSphere objects you want to protect according to the list of granular permissions above.
Besides security, it also makes vSphere Task List more clear - now all tasks performed from "root", so you cannot distinguish was it an administrator who used "root" that did a change in vSphere environment or Veeam server who used same "root" account (for example, during backup we take VM snapshots, mount disks, during restores we could create new NFS datastores, etc.) - with new service account you can be 100% accurate who did what =)
/Cheers!

[einhirn]

I don't know whether you ever got this fixed, but I ran into a similar issue in the last few days, so I'll add my experience if there's someone else coming here from google:

I changed the credentials Veeam uses to connect to vCenter and then used the credentials manager in Veeam to edit the saved password. It looked fine, rescan of vCenter worked and also the backup jobs ran mostly fine. But at some point along the line our AD password policy locked out the account. When looking at the logs for one of the jobs that failed, there obviously were some successful logins because snapshot were created, VM config data was gathered etc. But when it got to actually pulling the disk data, there were "Login failed" and "3014 (Insufficient permissions in the host operating system)" error messages. There's a KB entry for the latter message, but it didn't help because the permissions of the account in vCenter weren't changed.

So I figured that the old credentials were somehow (cached?) still being used for VDDK access. At first I just restarted the proxy machines, but that didn't help. Only after restarting Veeam main/management server, the jobs ran fine again, so we'll add a Veeam server reboot to our Veeam vCenter password change procedure.