Unable to login to vCenter using root account on vCenter appliance

[rzimmermann]

Hello

I have a strange problem. I can successfully login to our vCenter Appliance (Management of the Appliance over Port 548) using the root account.

Using the same root account with the same password, I'm unable to login to vSphere Web Client.

Any idea, on why this can happen?

Many thanks for any response.

René

[bayupw]

Hi Rene,

As documented in vSphere Documentation vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - Authenticating to the vCenter Server Environment

The user administrator@vsphere.local has vCenter Single Sign-On administrator privileges by default. When logged in to the vCenter Single Sign-On server from the vSphere Web Client, the administrator@vsphere.local user can assign vCenter Single Sign-On administrator privileges to other users.

Try logging in to vSphere Web Client with administrator@vsphere.local or admin@system-domain for vSphere 5.1.

You would need to set a password for the SSO admin first if you haven't done it.

See below links:

Deploying VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) (Linux) - vmwiki

http://www.virtxpert.com/deploying-vmware-vcenter-5-5-appliance-vcsa/

http://www.virtxpert.com/installing-vcenter-server-appliance-5-5-0b/

If you are using Embedded SSO with default config, you can specify the password in the VMware vCenter Server Appliance Web Console, it will take sometime to save the settings - you will need to stop the vCenter Service first before specifying administrator@vsphere.local password on the Summary tab.

If you forget the administrator or the account is locked, the procedures to unlock & reset the password is described in the KB article here: VMware KB: Unlocking and resetting the vCenter Single Sign-On administrator password

[rzimmermann]

Hi

Thanks for your informations. At the moment, I'm receiving the message, that my root account is locked when trying to log in to vSphere Web Client.

I have already done root account password reset according to this KB article:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=206904...

But I'm still getting the message that my account is locked.

Any idea?

Thank you

René

[oturn]

As to why you couldn't initially login as root... When you have a single sign-on identity source configured, the vCenter Server can't find the root logon unless you use the format root@localos.