vi-admin password reset on a vMA 5

With vSphere 5 came a new version of the vSphere Management Assistant (from now on: vMA 5). For more information on deploying and using the vMA 5, please read the “vSphere Management Assistant Guide”.

Previous versions of the vMA 5 were based on a CentOS 5.3 release. This new version is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 and has besides the traditional console, the familiar Web GUI, also be found on other VMware appliances.

On the vMA 5, the root account has been disabled, instead, the vi-admin account can perform the administrative operations. In case you have forgotten vi-admin’s password, you need to boot the vMA in single user mode and reset the password. In vMA 5, this procedure has changed a bit.

In this post I will present the complete procedure.

What is behind my https://vCenterServer ?

Hello and welcome. I expect that most readers of this post use their vSphere Client to connect to their vCenter Server and perform their daily business. You will probably know that the vCenter Server runs a web server, but do you know that the vCenter Server and also an ESXi host do have a few surprising and useful features?

Let us start and point our (supported) browser of choice to our vCenter Server. In the opening window, VMware presents a comprehensive summary. At this point, I have to admit, in most cases I finished reading at “vSphere Documentation”.

VMware vCenter Server IP address change

Recently, I have introduced a Cisco SG 300 switch in my home lab and with that the possibility to create VLANs. In the new network design, the vCenter Server was moved into a new management network. As a result, I needed to change the vCenter Server’s IP address.
It is home lab, so it is a full featured vCenter Server with options like: vSphere Update Manager, Auto Deploy, Syslog Collector and Dump Collector.

After changing the IP address, the first step was to rejoin the server to the Windows Domain and watch the result. This is what I got:

• ESXi hosts were disconnected. This was expected because the ESXi servers Management Interfaces has also been changed and were placed in the new Management network;
• No more vSphere Update Manager;
• No more Auto Deploy;
• No more Syslog- and Dump Collector.

For a moment, I considered rebuilding the vCenter Server from scratch. On the other hand, I was curious to find out if this issue could be resolved.