Issue

Upon connecting to vCenter for the first time the following error was thrown up byt the Zabbix server
 

Cannot complete login due to an incorrect user name or password

 

 

Troubleshooting

Find vmware poller processes. In this case its 2154 & 2155

# ps -aux | grep vmware

zabbix   2154  3.7  1.9 786000 37432 ?        S    14:51   2:08 /usr/sbin/zabbix_server: vmware collector #1 [updated 0, removed 0 VMware services in 0.000008 sec, idle 5 sec]
zabbix   2155  0.1  1.9 785848 37256 ?        S    14:51   0:04 /usr/sbin/zabbix_server: vmware collector #2 [updated 0, removed 0 VMware services in 0.000008 sec, idle 5 sec]

You can then increase the log levels to help with debugging

# zabbix_server -R log_level_increase="2154"
# zabbix_server -R log_level_increase="2155"

 

Looking in /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.log and can see the following entries

2155:20180416:142510.042 In vmware_service_update() '"vsphere.local\zabbix_vmw"'@'https://10.64.51.51/sdk'
2155:20180416:142510.043 In vmware_service_authenticate() '"vsphere.local\zabbix_vmw"'@'https://10.64.51.51/sdk'
2154:20180416:142510.953 __zbx_zbx_setproctitle() title:'vmware collector #1 [updated 0, removed 0 VMware services in 0.000008 sec, querying VMware services]'
2154:20180416:142510.953 __zbx_zbx_setproctitle() title:'vmware collector #1 [updated 0, removed 0 VMware services in 0.000007 sec, idle 5 sec]'
2155:20180416:142514.781 End of vmware_service_authenticate():FAIL

I was trying different variations such as [email protected] and quotation martks. As you can see from above I do not need the double quotation marks.