You can follow different password protection approaches depending on your environment setup.

Caution

If you specify passwords in plain text, you risk exposing the password to other users. The password might also become exposed in backup files. Do not provide plain-text passwords on production systems.

Follow one of the following approaches for protecting passwords.

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If you use a vCLI host management command interactively and do not specify a user name and password, you are prompted for them. The screen does not echo the password that you enter.

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For noninteractive use, you can create a session file using the save_session option. See Create and Use a Session File.

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Target a vCenter Server system and authenticate to vCenter Single Sign-On. You can save the corresponding session and use it for subsequent connections. See Authenticating Through vCenter Server and vCenter Single Sign-On.

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Use variables or configuration files.

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If you are running vCLI on a Windows system, you can use the --passthroughauth option. If the user who runs the command with that option is a known Active Directory user, no password is required.

If you are running vMA, you can set up target servers and run most vCLI commands against target servers without additional authentication. See the vSphere Management Assistant Guide.

With vCLI you can run scripts against multiple target servers from the same administration server. You must have the correct privileges to perform the actions on each target, and you must authenticate to the target.

Important

Administrators can place ESXi hosts in lockdown mode for enhanced security. By default, even the root user cannot run vCLI commands directly against ESXi hosts in lockdown mode. See vCLI and Lockdown Mode and the vSphere Security documentation.

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