Blog date: September 01, 2020
Completed on vSphere version: 6.7

Today my customer needed to change the root password for roughly 36 hosts across two data centers. These are two data centers that were recently built as part of my residency with them, and they have already seen the benefits of using host profiles. Today I was able to show them one more.

VMware has a KB68079 that details the process should the root password become unknown on a host. Well the same process can be applied and used to update the password on all hosts with that host profile attached. At the time of writing this article, all hosts are compliant with the current host profile, and there are no outstanding issues.

In the vSphere client, go to ‘Policies and Profiles’ and select ‘Host Profiles’ in the left column, click and select the desired host profile on the right.

• Edit the desired host profile.

• In the search field, type root and hit enter.
• Select root in the left column.
• In the right column, change the field below ‘Password’ to Fixed password Configuration.

Now you are prompted with password fields and can update the root password.

Click Save once the new password has been entered.

Now you can remediate the hosts against the updated host profile, and the root account will get updated on each host.
– Out of an abundance of caution, it is always good to spot check a handful of hosts to validate the new password.

I had my customer go back and edit the host profile once more and change the ‘Password’ field back to: Leave password unchanged for the default account. Click save, and then remediate the cluster again. The new password will stay.

Before I connected with the customer today, they had already researched how to update the root password on all hosts with a script, but this method is simple, automated and built into vSphere.