PPMA shows ESXi hosts as Unlicensed and rpowermt commands fail with an error "User Authentication Invalid"

NA for this issue (No change related to PowerPath contributed to this issue)

Environment:    
PowerPath Management Appliance (PPMA) 2.6
PowerPath/VE 6.4.0.00.01-b001 
ESXi 6.5.0 Update 1

PPMA shows ESXi hosts as Unlicensed and rpowermt commands fail with an error "User Authentication Invalid".

This issue seems to be something on the network as the PPMA was unable to communicate to the ESXi hosts via the port 5989 and was failing with the error "Connection Refused"

We checked, the sfcb.cfg (located under /etc/sfcb/sfcb.cfg) found that the config file was missing most of the entries compared to the working hosts.

Here is what the sfcb.cfg file on the problematic hosts looks like:   

disabledProviders:
sslClientCertificate:ignore
doBasicAuth:true
enabled:true
wsman:true
provMemOveride:sehost_omc=240

The sfcb.cfg file on the working hosts were populated with the usual parameters:     

keepaliveTimeout:1
cimXmlFdHardLimit:1024
useChunking:true
sslClientTrustStore:/etc/sfcb/client.pem
basicAuthLib:sfcBasicPAMAuthentication
sslCertificateFilePath:/etc/vmware/ssl/rui.crt
keepaliveMaxRequest:10
sslKeyFilePath:/etc/vmware/ssl/rui.key
cimXmlFdSoftLimit:512
providerTimeoutInterval:120
sslClientCertificate:ignore
maxFailureThreshold:3
intSockTimeout:600
provProcs:16
disabledProviders:
rcvSocketTimeOut:0
doBasicAuth:true
enableHttps:true
registrationDir:/var/lib/sfcb/registration
requestQueueSize:10
threadPoolSize:5
enabled:true
threadStackSize:524288
provMemOveride:sehost_omc=240
enableInterOp:true
maxSemInitRetries:5
enableHttp:true
httpsPort:5989
loglevel:warning
httpLocalOnly:true
wsman:true
httpProcs:2
httpsProcs:4
certificateAuthLib:sfcCertificateAuthentication
httpPort:5988


Note:     
The sfcb.cfg file corrupted/missing content is something on the ESXi layer and PowerPath does not contribute in generating this config file hence, user should check with VMware to understand the reason behind the same as this looks like something may be wrong while building the ESXi host at the profile/image level.

Replace the sfcb.cfg file from working hosts to the problematic hosts followed by the following commands:    

localcli hardware ipmi sel clear
esxcli system wbem set -e 0
esxcli system wbem set -e 1

Run rpowermt command and it should return the expected output.