Symptoms:

• The vCloud Director appliance management user interface "Promote" button does not update the selected standby to become the new primary appliance.
• Some replication manager (repmgr) tool commands fail with errors such as "nodes unreachable via SSH".
• Upon startup, the appliance OS console displays error messages such as "[FAILED] Failed to start User Manager".

This issue occurs when the postgres user password has expired on one or more vCloud Director appliances.
The postgres user account password for the vCloud Director 9.7 appliance deployment is set to expire on May 25, 2019.
The postgres user account password for the vCloud Director 9.7.0.1 appliance deployment is set to expire on July 9, 2019.

This is a known issue affecting vCloud Director 9.7 and 9.7.0.1 appliance deployments.
This does not affect non-appliance vCloud Director deployments.

This issue is resolved in vCloud Director for Service Providers 9.7.0.2, available at VMware Downloads .

Workaround:
Set the postgres user account password to never expire. You must run the commands on all appliances individually.

1. Log in directly or SSH to the vCloud Director appliance OS as root.
2. Set the postgres user account and password to never expire by running this command:

3. To confirm that your settings are applied, run the command chage --list postgres.

The system output should confirm that the postgres user account and password are set to never expire.