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gidprodanny
Contributor
Contributor

Retreive esxi password from old VCDB after failed upgrade 6.5->6.7

Hi, we have a failed upgrade from 6.5 to 6.7, and were unable to get the old vcenter 6.5 working. its windows, not aplliance.
However we do have plenty of snapshots and a working postgress database from the old setup.
we installed in the meantime a brand new 6.7 and where able to recreate the environment but... 3 hosts have root password we dont know anymore.

we lab tested the shadow copy password reset, and know it works. but that means downtime, we rather avoid.

is there any way we can extract the passwords from the database? or insert the missing hosts in to the new database?

we see like this in the database

VCDB=# select ip_address,password from vpx_host;

172.16.xx | *HbPh/Bw9bLrte+OEQRJ55e+UM/DxMBwMDGldfgd8rBSzsbwFalo3Gem6pjxPO16XlCVpTg368AO6n05nLqfbA==

can we reverse engineer that encrypted entry? or use it in any way?

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

To my knowledge, you cannot reverse a password, but your question is probably better asked of GSS.

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berndweyand
Expert
Expert

is your only problem to reset the esxi-rootpassword ? and are the host still connected to the old vcenter ?

then you have a chance to reset the password : Password Root

if vmotion is working you can do this without downtime

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gidprodanny
Contributor
Contributor

Hi, thank you for your answer, no there is no old vcenter anymore. i know how to reset when i turn off the host, but i would like to give it a last try over here, so there no downtime.

So we cant extract the password from the vcdb ?

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TimSheppard
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

>So we cant extract the password from the vcdb ?

Short answer - no.

It would not be a secure product if you could discover a host root password from the VCDB.

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sudeshnas
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi gidprodanny,

The VCDB donot have a table to store the esxi hosts passwords.

The password can be reset  but cannot be retreived without performing the esxi re install.

This can be achieved by the use of host profiles and if you there is an enterpise plus license avaliable for the vsphere.

Steps to achevie:

VMware Knowledge Base

Please mark this answer right if this helps you to isolate the issue.

Regards,

Sudeshna Sarkar

vmware community moderator

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