The following procedure applies to NSX Manager, NSX Edge, Cloud Service Manager, and NSX Intelligence appliances.

Note: If you have an NSX Manager cluster, resetting the password for any of the local users on one NSX Manager automatically resets the password for the other NSX Managers in the cluster. Note that the synchronization of the password can take several minutes or more.

If you have renamed the local user, use the new name in the following procedures.

When you reboot an appliance, the GRUB boot menu does not appear by default. The following procedure requires that you have configured GRUB to display the GRUB boot menu. For more information about configuring GRUB and changing the GRUB root password, see "Configure an Appliance to Display the GRUB Menu at Boot Time" in the NSX-T Data Center Installation Guide.

If you know the password for root but have forgotten the password for your local users, you can reset it using the following procedure:
  1. Log in to the appliance as root.
  2. For an NSX Intelligenceappliance or a Cloud Service Manager, skip this step. ForNSX Edge, run the command /etc/init.d/nsx-edge-api-server stop. Otherwise, run the command /etc/init.d/nsx-mp-api-server stop.
  3. (Optional) To reset the password for admin, run the command passwd admin.
  4. (Optional) To reset the password for audit, run the command passwd audit.
  5. (Optional) For NSX-T Data Center 3.1.1, to reset a guest user password, run the command passwd guestusername.
  6. Run the command touch /var/vmware/nsx/reset_cluster_credentials.
  7. For NSX Edge, run the command /etc/init.d/nsx-edge-api-server start. Otherwise, run the command /etc/init.d/nsx-mp-api-server start.

If you have forgotten the root user's password, you can reset it using the following procedure. You can then use the above procedure to reset the password for all local users.

Procedure

  1. Connect to the console of the appliance.
  2. Reboot the system.
  3. When the GRUB boot menu appears, press the left SHIFT or ESC key quickly. If you wait too long and the boot sequence does not pause, you must reboot the system again.
  4. Press e to edit the menu.
    Choose the top Ubuntu line then enter the user name root and the GRUB password for root (not the same as the appliance's user root). The default password is VMware1.
  5. Press e to edit the selected option.
  6. Search for the line starting with linux and add systemd.wants=PasswordRecovery.service to the end of the line.
  7. Press Ctrl-X to boot.
  8. When the log messages stop, enter the new password for root.
  9. Enter the password again.
    The boot process continues.
  10. After the reboot, you can verify the password change by logging in as root with the new password.