Password complexity problem in vCloud Automation Center 6.0

Yesterday i encountered a password complexity problem when installing vCloud Automation Center 6.0. My customer requires a 24 character password for all their service accounts and the passwords are automatically generated. The vCAC service account for running the vCAC IaaS services was configured with the following password:

)ERj%l28AFh2(RT)!8#”1234

Yeah i know 24 character for a proof of concept (POC) environment password might be a little bit weird but if that is the customer requirement i guess you have to adapt to the situation.

During the IaaS installation, on a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, i selected the complete option and filled in all the required information. The installation continued for a while before it stopped with the following error:

The text seen in the textbox is shown below:
Executing:”C:Program Files (x86)VMwarevCACServerConfigToolvCAC-Config.exe” /S “/P:C:UsersmagnusAppDataLocalTempvCACMsiConfigToolProperties.vCAC-Server-ConfigTool.xml” “/L:C:Program Files (x86)VMwarevCACServerConfigToolLogvCACConfiguration-20140205015216.log”

This didn’t gave me much information so i started to look in the log file using the link provided (excellent by the way) by the installer.

I found the below information in the log file and if you take a look at the green marked text we can clearly see that something seems weird with the password string:
Info : 2014-02-05 01 53 32 190  :Executing C:Program Files (x86)VMwarevCACServerConfigToolEncryptionKeyToolDynamicOps.Tools.EncryptionKeyTool.exe Key-Generate -pp “*******************”1234” -s “temptemp” -vd -cs “Data Source=vc-demo01.vcdx56.com;Initial Catalog=temptemp;Integrated Security=true;” -uc “C:Program Files (x86)VMwarevCACServerModel Manager WebWeb.config” -v

Taking a look at the password, )ERj%l28AFh2(RT)!8#”1234, we can see that the ” sign seems to be the problem in this case and not e.g. password length.

I changed the ” sign in the password but kept the length of 24 characters and the installation completed successfully.

I had to remove the vCAC installation folder found in the directory C:Program Files (x86)VMware, the 443 binding in Internet Information Services (IIS) and the vCAC application created in IIS before the next installation attempt.

I have also seen vCAC IaaS installation issues when using the character ! in the end of the vCAC IaaS service account password but the installation completed successfully when i tested it myself.

Conclusion

Stay away from using the character ” anywhere in the in the vCAC IaaS Service account password and, since i have seen other people having problem with the character ! in the end of the vCAC IaaS service account password i will stay away from that one as well.

This VMware KB article provides special characters you should avoid using at least for the vSphere Single Sign On (SSO) but might be useful in other areas as well.. Thanks Heino Skov for the KB article heads up!