Esxi password

[malabelle]

     Hi.

I'm in the process of upgrading from vc5.5 to vc6.

The upgrade asked me to regenerate the ssl cert of vc or the upgrade would not proceed.

I did.

When it rebooted, all the hosts were disconnected so I took a powercli script to reconnect them.

The problem is I have 7 hosts in one of my cluster that won't take any possible password. I use host profiles per cluster so each should have the same password.

The 7 hosts are still running production VMs.

Is there a way to reset the password? To access the host, anything?

If not, I will have to force close the blades, wait that HA restart the vm elsewhere and reinstall those hosts...

[npadmani · Accepted solution]

ESXi 3.5, ESXi 4.x, ESXi 5.x and ESXi 6.0

Reinstalling the ESXi host is the only supported way to reset a password on ESXi. Any other method may lead to a host failure or an unsupported configuration due to the complex nature of the ESXi architecture. ESXi does not have a service console and as such traditional Linux methods of resetting a password, such as single-user mode.

Ref: https://communities.vmware.com/create-advanced-comment.jspa?id=2589349&draftID=235312

are these hosts AD domain joined, if so and if your AD have ESX Admins group, it would be automatically designated as Administrator role on your host.