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How To Change Lost Password on Your ESX Server

 

You will need to have access to the serial console of the server which has your ESX installation, or access to keyboard and display attached directly to the same box.

To change the password, we’ll follow this procedure:

1) Reboot ESX server.

Unfortunately, if you don’t remember your root password, there won’t be a clean way to reboot your server. Try to shutdown all the VMs running on it, and then power-cycle the box running ESX.

2) Boot ESX server in single user mode

In this mode, you won’t be asked for a root password. When you see the following screen, press the "a" key:

… to change ESX kernel boot parameters. Your screen will look like this:

Now, simply type a space and "single" word, then press Enter:

Eventually, your ESX server will boot and give you a root command line prompt, which means you can do what you want from this moment on:

Assuming you want to change your root password, move on to the next step.

3) Change ESX root password to a new one

Simply type "passwd" and give your new password twice:

sh-2.05b# passwd
Changing password for user root.
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

That’s it! You have changed the ESX password! Now it’s time to reboot the system and allow ESX server to come back up online.

4) Reboot ESX server once again

Type "reboot" and wait for the ESX server to come back online in a few minutes:

sh-2.05# reboot