In my previous blog post Managing ESXi Local User Accounts from vCenter Server Using PowerCLI, I provided a quick walkthrough of how to manage ESXi local user accounts using VMware PowerCLI and VMware vCenter Server. This post will provide a similar walkthrough, but I will utilize VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator this time. Getting Started This walkthrough assumes that you already have a working VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator deployment and that you’ve already established a connection to your VMware vCenter Server instance from VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator.

There was once a time early in my career when I would SSH to each VMware ESXi host and manually update the root account’s password. As time went by and the environment I was responsible for grew larger, so did the workload for resetting root account passwords regularly. Eventually, I researched and learned that these VMware ESXi local user accounts could be modified using VMware PowerCLI, and password updates became a much easier task.

You might not know it from how VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator (formerly VMware vRealize Orchestrator) is marketed today, but originally, Aria Automation Orchestrator was bundled as a component of VMware vCenter Server. Titled VMware vCenter Orchestrator back in the day, it was one of the best ways to automate actions within your VMware vCenter Server. While vCenter Orchestrator was rebranded as vRealize Orchestrator, and now as Aria Automation Orchestrator, it is still included as a feature with each VMware vCenter Server license.

After testing a recent upgrade to VMware vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3i, I encountered an issue where the vCenter Server would no longer authenticate users via smart cards/X.509 certificates. The vCenter Server would not even request a certificate from the client’s browser anymore. This seemed odd as the functionality worked fine on the previous 7.0 Update 3h. Surely VMware wouldn’t make a breaking change within a minor patch release? After reverting the upgrade and testing that it wasn’t an issue with the upgrade process itself, a support ticket was opened with VMware support.

VMware released the latest update to the VMware Aria Suite, VMware Aria Automation 8.11, on January 20, 2023. This release focuses primarily on improvements to public cloud support, Guardrails improvements (SaaS offering only), minor product enhancements, and bug fixes.