2020 Update: It seems as though this issue also pops up if doing a major version upgrade of the VCSA through the migration option. I was getting this error upon source appliance validation.
A problem occurred while getting data from the source vCenter Server
This Installer Log was showing these entries in relation to the OVF Tool check
The same fix applies as shown below:
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It seems like an interesting “condition” has worked its self into recent VCSA builds where upon completing upgrades, the process seems to reset the root account expiration flag. This blocked my proceeding with an upgrade and only worked when I followed the steps listed below.
The error I got is shown below:
“Appliance (OS) root password is expired or is going to expire soon. Please change the root password before installing an update.”
When this happened on the first vCenter I went to upgrade, I thought that maybe there was a chance I had forgotten to set that to never expires… but usually by default I check that setting and set it to never expires… not the greatest security practice, but for my environments it’s something I set almost automatically during initial configuration. After reaching out on Twitter, I got some immediate feedback saying to reset the root password by going into single user mode… which did work.
When this happened a second time on a second VCSA, on which I without question set the never expires flag to true, I took a slightly different approach to the problem and decided to try reset the password from the VCSA Console, however that process fails as well.
After going back through the Tweet responses, I did come across this VMwareKB which lays down the issue and offers the reason behind the errors.
This issue occurs when VAMI is not able to change an expired root password.
Fair enough… but I don’t have a reason for the password never expires option not being honoured? Some feedback and conversations suggest that maybe this is a bug that’s worked its way into recent builds during upgrade procedures. In any case the way to fix it is simple and doesn’t need console access to access the command line… you just need to SSH into the VCSA and reset the root password as shown below.
Once done, the VCSA upgrade proceeds as expected. As you can see there we have also confirmed that the Password Expires is set to never. If anyone can confirm the behaviour regarding that flag being reset, feel free to comment below.
Apart from that, there is the quick fix!
References:
