Recently, I upgraded one of my vSphere environments from vSphere 5.5 GA to 5.5 Update 1b. It all went smoothly and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Well, except for when I tried to use vCenter Orchestrator. The service was down and trying to start it, didn’t work. It was as if it was in its unconfigured state.

Thinking of checking the configuration, I tried to log into the configuration page and was hit by the following message:

Login failed: User/password mismatch or account temporarily blocked after too many unsuccessful attempts

vCO Password Message

Now that was unusual because I was absolutely sure about the password and I also knew that Orchestrator was working just before the upgrade – well because I checked it! Just to make sure, I also checked the default password and it also failed in the same way. That was a bit of an issue as how could I possibly fix the service if I can’t get into the configuration!

I was kinda in a hurry so after spending a few minutes not finding a way in, I decided to reset the password. As the process is not that well-known, I thought I should just quickly blog about it so that people can find it easily if needed.

The process is as follows:

  1. Go to <Install Directory>\VMware\Infrastructure\Orchestrator\configuration\conf
  2. Find the file “passwd.properties” (or “password.properties” if your system has been around for a while) and make a copy of it as a backup.
  3. Edit the file and replace whatever is in there with either vmware=92963abd36c896b93a36b8e296ff3387 OR vmware=SHA512WithSalt\:GZ5wTW6Ni5x7\:wNCp8I8zHv7GQItrKDRjAgKsddjD4GUZ6nrOYhuEl3D+x4BT5Xs1KL8f/R2T3K2nYPzMwVTW9E9mmbvESAU3ww\=\=
  4. Save the file and restart the vCenter Orchestrator Configuration service.

I actually used the first string as that’s what I knew from olden days but the string has changed since so try either one of them.

Once done, you should be able to log into the page using the default combination of username and password. It will go through the default behaviour of getting you to change the password as usual and you should gain your access back.

If, like mine, your environment has been upgraded year after year as the different versions came out then the path mentioned above may not be valid. Mine was in a different location too. Just do a search for the file from the “Orchestrator” level folder; there should only be one of those files under the structure.

Hope this helps!