Here is a small writeup on resetting the root account password for vCenter / Cloud Builder VM.

I was deploying VCF enf and the root account for Cloud Builder account got locked out. So thought of writing a small blog on it. You can find my VCF posts here. https://virtualrove.com/vcf/

Let’s get started.

Reboot the “Cloud Builder” VM / vCenter and press the ‘e’ key to enter the GNU GRUB Edit Menu.
Locate the 3^rd row which starts with ‘linux’ at the beginning.

Write following at the end of the line and press F10

rw init=/bin/bash

You will get to command line after this. Run following commands.

mount -o remount,rw /                                 ::: To mount the root partition
passwd                                                          ::: To enter new password, then re-type new password.
/sbin/pam_tally2 –user=root –reset       ::: To unlock the locked root account. Run this twice.
umount /                                                        ::: To unmount the partition
reboot -f                                                         ::: Reboot the VM

Thats it. You should be able to get in with the new password for root account after the reboot.
Short & Simple. 😊

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