Unable to reset the expired admin password, NSX UI is stuck in a password reset loop

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

• Logging in to the NSX UI displays a warning message indicating that the admin password has expired and prompts for a password reset.
• After resetting the admin password, logging in with the new password prompts another reset.
• The system is caught in a password reset loop.
  
• Logging in to NSX as admin via the VM console shows the account is locked.

Environment

VMware NSX 

Resolution

If you encounter this issue with a version newer than VMware NSX 4.2, please open a support case with Broadcom Support and refer to this KB article.

For more information, see Creating and managing Broadcom support cases.

Workaround

1. After following steps in resetting passwords on an appliance . Please wait for at least 1 minute for password sync to happen.
2. Verify root, admin and audit passwords are the same on all three nodes. For this, you can SSH to all 3 NSX Managers nodes using the admin, root and audit credentials and validate login is successful.
3. Then, SSH to the host used for password reset and log in as root.
4. Delete the file /var/vmware/nsx/reset_cluster_credentials with the command

rm /var/vmware/nsx/reset_cluster_credentials

5. Restart the nsx-mp-api-server/nsx-edge-api-server as follows:

systemctl restart nsx-mp-api-server

6. After the service restarts passwords can be changed from admin with the command

set user admin password
set user audit password
set user root password

7. These passwords will synchronize as expected.