ESXi root password not working.

[AlvaroVeiga]

Dear community,

I have changed the root password of my ESXi appliance and after closing the session and trying to log in again, it says wrong password.

The first time it happened I had to reinstall ESXi and I thought that it was my fault c+p wrong password, however I pasted the same password and now I am locked out again.

Does the ESXi not support some characters? The password in question is:

I8b39JyeP^ft

My two cent is the  ^ , maybe it is changing to a different character? Or I will have to reinstall again?

Thanks.

[sjesse]

The only supported method of resetting the password is reinstalling, but if you have vcenter and are licensed for host profiles you can use

VMware Knowledge Base

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

Sjesse's answer is correct.

It happened to me and I also wrote an Italian tutorial on the procedure:

Come cambiare la password di root ESXi 6.5 con Host Profiles – AleAdmin.it

ARomeo

[a_p_]

It's indeed possible that the "^" character is causing the issue. This character has special use cases on different platforms, so I'd actually avoid to use it.

If you want to try things like this, consider creating another (temporary) user to test this, so that you can reset that user's password as the root.

André

[b.w]

or you can try the hint from IRIX: Password Root

[bariscandan57]

Did you check your keyboard?  Sometimes keyboards mislead us

[nachogonzalez]

Even though the only supported method for recovering ESXi password is reinstalling you have a few other options:

Do you have AD authentication enabled? If so an ESXI administrator might be able to log in and reset credentials
Is the host connected to vCenter? If it is and you have enterprise plus licensing you might be able to apply a host profile and change the root password.
VMware Knowledge Base

Let me know if that works