How to solve VMWare Appliance Management “Unable to login” with correct credentials

I am unsure what changed in the environment to cause the inability to login to VAMI (VMWare Appliance Management Interface), but one day I attempted to get in and I received the “Unable to login” error.

This is, of course, different from a incorrect credentials which would result in the below, “Unable to authenticate user”

First I logged into the console using Putty and ran the below command to restart VAMI.

root@vCenter [ ~ ]# service-control --restart applmgmt

This did allow me to login, but after a unknown amount of time the issue would come back, in my case the next day. The next opportunity to troubleshoot the issue, I found a thread about deleting the /var/vmware/applmgmt/session directory. Before doing so, I used WinSCP to navigate to the directory and download the directory to my local computer, in case anything goes wrong. I did find that inside this directory is a file “applmgmt-session.conf”. Although I can not find a lot about the contents of this file, I believe it is just information regarding login.

root@vCenter [ ~ ]# cd /var/vmware/applmgmt/session/
root@vCenter [ /var/vmware/applmgmt/session ]# ls
applmgmt-session.conf
root@vCenter [ /var/vmware/applmgmt/session ]# 

As I was already in WinSCP to copy over the directory to my local computer, I went ahead and deleted it from there using WinSCP. Of course, nothing changed so I went ahead and ran the “service-control –restart applmgnt” command.

root@vCenter [ /var/vmware/applmgmt/session ]# service-control --restart applmgmt

After refreshing the webpage and attempting to login, I get a new error:

As you can see in the error, it seems to be looking to create a “applmgmt-session.conf.new’ file in a session directory that doesn’t exits anymore! So we will go back into WinSCP and instead of putting the problem directory back, we will just create a new “session” directory and restart the services again.

root@vCenter [ /var/vmware/applmgmt ]# ls
session
root@vCenter [ /var/vmware/applmgmt ]# service-control --restart applmgmt

Now after restarting “applmgmt” I wondered it that part was neccesary and maybe placing the sessions directory would have been enough, but regardless, a restart later and I can login.

As always, I hope this tutorial was helpful and informative. If you have any questions please feel free to comment and I will get back to you as soon as I am able.