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.