Resetting lost vSphere Replication root password

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• The root password for the vSphere Replication (VR) appliance is not known by the administrator
• You do not know the root password for the VR appliance
• The VR password is lost

Environment

VMware vSphere Replication 8.x

Resolution

For vSphere Replication 8.X the naming is slightly different at /etc/pam.d/system-auth

It’s an example, but we can modify the parameters as below:

Deny=xxxx (if there’s 3 attempts, you can put 300)
root_unlock_time=1 , so it will be unlocked after 1 second



When you are ready to reboot the machine simply run the following:

echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger