Restarting vCloud Network & Security Manager Web Service

Some time it happen that your vCloud Networking & Security Manager (vShield Manager) stop behaving & you want to restart it. One of the scenarios where you might need this if it stop synchronizing properly with vCenter or vCloud Director. The good news is most of these problems were resolved with the latest release of vCloud Network & Security Manager, but if it happen and you need to restart your vCNS services then below the commands that you can execute at the vCloud Network & Security Manager Console without the need to reboot the vCNS Appliance which can take a while. Below is how to do so in a step by step fashion:

1- Login to your vCNS Console (Default user name & password are as follow u:admin & password: default, if you want to change them you can follow my earlier post: Changing vCNS Console Password

2- Change to enable mode using the following command:

manager> enable

3- Change to Configure Terminal mode using the following command:
manager# configure terminal

4- Stop the web-manager service using the following command:
manager(config)# no web-manager

5- Execute the following command to restart the web-manager service
manager(config)# web-manager

I usually recommend stopping the web-manager service before shutting down vCloud Network & Security Manager if required for maintenance or so on.… Read More

Changing vCloud Networking & Security Console Password

While Changing the vCloud Networking & Security or vShield Manager Web Interface password is well documented at: Hardening vCloud Networking and Security 5.1.x virtual appliances, changing the console password of vCloud Network & Security or vShield Manager does not seems to be as well documented. Actually I have read in few places that its not possible to change the console password and enable password for vCloud Networking & Security Manager & Appliances. While that is partially true, you can actually recreate the admin account with the desired password which give you a similar effect to changing the password of the vCNS console admin account. The below procedure shows how to achieve just that in a step by step fashion:

How to change vCloud Networking & Security Console Password:

1. Connect to the console of the vShield Manager

2. Log in as ‘admin’  using the default credentials (U: admin  P: default)

3. Switch to ‘enable’ mode

  manager: enable

4. Switch to configuration mode

manager# configure terminal

5.  Create a temporary user, let’s call it tmpadmin

manager(config)# user tmpadmin password plaintext Newpassw0rd1

6. Save the configuration.

manager(config)# write memory

7. Exit twice until you are logged out

8. Log in as the new tmpadmin to the CLI and switch to ‘enable’ mode.… Read More