One of my former colleagues(who wants to remain anonymous) notified me about this. Although many of you might not even be doing this, for just the few who are it is useful to know this caveat.
For security reasons some customers have the requirement to insert specific account information for every user. It appears that when you modify the details for “vpxuser” in /etc/passwd and the vpxuser password is refreshed these account details are overwritten. (Every 30 days the vpxuser password gets refreshed.) According to my former colleague this has been fixed in vCenter 4.0 but the “issue” does exist in vCenter 2.5 Update 6 today.
“For security reasons some customers have the requirement to insert specific account information for every user.” – for this very reason I think it so important to review and check any security policies customers have in place before deploying a virtualization solution. It may be very helpful to adjust and tune existing policies. – This is a very elagant way to overcome technical hurdles like this one.
“insert specific account information for every user.” That’s interesting, as I’ve seen policies to the exact contrary. Some systems for security purposes have no user specific identification associated with a description field etc. That information is kept elsewhere. I’d rather not take a stand on either approach, I can find problems with both.