If you are running VCF 9.0 You have probably seen this banner...
Broadcom has officially announced its deprecating the SDDC Manager UI in future releases, with Day-N workflows moving to the VCF Operations Console as documented on the Broadcom Tech Docs site. The service itself and its API are not going anywhere. Just the UI. Naturally, I wanted to see how password management holds up in the new console.
Within the VCF 9.0 Operation Console, Password management lives under Fleet Management > Passwords and the first thing you notice is how polished it is compared to the equivalent page in SDDC Manager. The dashboard gives you an at-a-glance view of account status, component coverage, and password alerts across your entire fleet, which is genuinely useful in larger environments managing multiple VCF instances.
The filtering is particularly good. You can slice by component type, status, or VCF instance, making it easy to zero in on exactly what you need without scrolling through a flat list. In environments with a lot of managed components this alone is a quality of life improvement worth noting.
From here you can Update and Remediate passwords across a broad range of components including vCenter, NSX, ESXi, VCF Automation, VCF Operations, VCF Operations for Logs, VCF Operations for Networks, and Fleet Management.
A Key Difference Worth Knowing
One distinction worth calling out: Update in VCF Operations is not the same as Rotate in SDDC Manager. Update lets you specify the password value yourself, which is useful when syncing with a password vault or an external system. Rotate generates a randomised password automatically with no user input. Neither approach is strictly better, they serve different use cases.
What Still Requires SDDC Manager
Not everything has landed in the Operations Console yet. Rotate, scheduled auto-rotation, and retrieving credentials programmatically all still require SDDC Manager. The API surface at /v1/credentials is unchanged and fully supported in VCF 9.0, so anything you were doing there continues to work as expected.
| Action | Console |
|---|---|
| View password status and alerts | VCF Operations |
| Update password (user-specified value) | VCF Operations |
| Remediate password | VCF Operations |
| Rotate password (auto-generated) | SDDC Manager |
| Schedule auto-rotation | SDDC Manager |
| Retrieve credentials via API | SDDC Manager |
Looking Ahead
It would be interesting to see rotation and scheduling surface in the VCF Operations Console in a future release. Having the full password management lifecycle in one place, alongside monitoring, alerting, and lifecycle management, would make for a much cleaner operational experience. For now, both consoles have a role to play and knowing which one to reach for makes all the difference.
I hope you found this helpful. Feel free to comment if you have any questions.
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