Since vCenter 6.5 the root password for vCenter expires every 90 days as opposed to the previous 365. I hadn’t changed this in my lab for some time and found out whilst carrying out patching.

Resolution

Whilst in my lab I was checking the latest updates in vSphere Lifecycle Manager and ran a report and was faced with the following message:

Please change appliance (OS) root password before attempting an update.

On trying to log into the VAMI interface I was met with a further error message:

Exception in invoking authentication handler User Password expired.

In my case this was a simple case of connecting to the vCenter via SSH and logging in. At that point I was prompted to change the password as can be seen below.

If SSH had been disabled I would have had to use the console on the vCenter Appliance and log in there instead.

Documentation

The official KB for this can be found on the VMware website KB 75107