Losing a root password isn’t something that happens often, but when it does it’s normally a really irritating time. I have to rotate the password of all hosts once a month for compliance, but sometimes a host drops out of the loop and the root password gets lost. Fortunately, as the vpxuser is still valid I can manage the host via vCenter – this lends itself to this little recovery process:
- Join the host to the domain (I’ve got a handy post for that here)
- Create the “ESX Admins” group in your AD and ensure that you are a member. The AD group will be given full administrator rights on the host automatically.
- Wait for replication, and the host to pick up the group and membership – it took about 15 minutes for me.
- You can now connect directly to the host using the vSphere Client – head on to the “Local Users & Groups” page and edit “root”:
- You should now be able to connect to the host using your new root password.
Hmmm?? easily done using host profiles.
http://blog.clearpathsg.com/blog/bid/301156/Lost-Your-ESXi-Root-Password-Reset-It-with-Host-Profiles
Thanks for your comments, not everyone has the licensing to have host profiles available to reset the password that way – in that case this would work for them.