VMware vCenter is now shifting toward the all in one appliance running Photon OS, a Linux container optimized operating system by VMware.
Whatever you have lost your password or the deployment failed and the supplied password was not applied, you will need to reset it. To do so, simply the following procedure :
1. On boot, immediately after the BIOS post, press “E” on the Photon OS boot screen ;
2. On the 3rd line of the Grub screen (starting by “linux”, ending by “consoleblank=0”), add one space and append “rw init=/bin/bash” at the very end ;
3. Press “F10” or “CTRL+X” to boot with the entered parameters ;
4. The appliance will start in the bash environment as root, simply type “passwd” and enter the new password ;
5. Once the password is set, enter the command “umount /” ;
6. Then force reboot using “reboot -f”.