Unable to locate Migrated Virtual Appliance Esxi 5.5

[dr_chiller]

Hi Peeps,

Hope somebody can offer me some assistance....

the current scenario :

all sysadmin have left the company and also taken all the details of the vmware infrastructure with them including all root passwords.

we have in total 60 Esxi host running 5.5 on HP Blades of different Generations up to Gen 8.

the infrastructure is broken into 2 locations and has been setup using stretched VLANS etc.

we have a number of storage solutions, 3Par and EVA's that are running fine.

what has happened is the virtual appliance has gone down and we are unable to locate its whereabouts, its pingable just not contactable via C# client or via the web - but we can get to the Virtual appliance page but as we have no details we cannot login.

what i need to understand is - is there an easy way of locating the Virtual Appliance that houses all our inventory ? i did find out what host it was on originally and i have checked this and the logs but cannot locate anything such as a world ID etc.

as veeam also looks at the Virtual appliance we have no current backups, i have spoken to Vmware themselves and they have advised the only way to do this is to reset the password on all the blades esxi hosts, yes i can do this but its going to take in the region of 60 man hours to complete out of hours.

So just chucking it out there in the chance of some wizard being able to point me in the right direction.

Much thanks in advance

[firestartah]

Hi,

So you can't login to any of the hosts locally due to lack of root passwords? why not reset it via this? https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=13178...

As for not looking through all 60 hosts for it that shouldn't be an issue as unless you are using stretched vSphere clusters then the appliance should be on your primary site if it is meant to be for there.

[dr_chiller]

i know how to reset the passwords matey - as said in the article your supplied VMWare do not support it and they only support re install of the host.

should of said we are in a stretched cluster.

cheers

[vHaridas]

Hi,

"not contactable via C# client or via the web - but we can get to the Virtual appliance page but as we have no details we cannot login."

Do you mean you can access the web client page but cannot login as you don't have username/password?

See How to reset appliance root password -

VMware KB: VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 and 6.0 root account locked out after password expira...

Reset SSO Admin Password

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=20346...

To follow above process, you need to have VM console access but you are also saying you don't have username/password to ESXi in that case you will not able to perform above task.

So as VMware said, you need to restart ESXi Host and reset root password.

Officially VMware do not support resetting password of ESXi 3.5 and later versions.

VMware KB: Changing a forgotten root password on an ESX/ESXi host

At the end you are left with trying unsupported way of resetting password of ESXi, this works very well if you don't make any mistake and if you break anything VMware will not support you.

Note, to reset root password of ESXi Host, you need to restart ESXi Host and with that your all VMs running on that Host will go down.

See - ESXi - Reset the password for root

Try above process in test ESXi before you do it in Prod esxi host. you can install ESXi in VMware workstation to try this.

Once you get access to ESXi with root/password, you can move on.

You will have to reset each ESXi host password separately.

Thanks,

Virtual Admin