the birdhouse in my soul

VMware's solution to a lost or forgotten root password for ESXi is simple: go to  https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1317898?lang=en_US  and you'll find that "Reinstalling the ESXi host is the only supported way to reset a password on ESXi". If your host is still connected to vCenter, you may be able to use Host Profiles to reset the root password, or alternatively you can join ESXi in Active Directory via vCenter, and log in with a user in the "ESX Admins" AD group. If your host is no longer connected to vCenter, those options are closed. Can you avoid reinstallation? Fortunately, you can. You will need to reset and reboot your ESXi though. If you're ready for an unsupported deep dive into the bowels of ESXi, follow these steps: Create a bootable Linux USB-drive (or something else you can boot your server with). I used a CentOS 7 installation USB-drive that I could use to boot into rescue mode. Reset your ESXi and boot from the Linux medium. Ident...

Imagine wanting to access a VM, but you don't know the IP address, and you don't have a GUI client for your vSphere environment? The most basic way of getting the IP address of a VM from the vSphere hypervisor level, is logging in to the ESXi Shell (could be local or SSH), and finding your VM number in the VM list: # vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms In my example, my VM has number 42. Then type # vim-cmd vmsvc/get.summary 42 | grep ipAddress       ipAddress = "10.11.12.13",  Et voila! NB this requires running VMware tools in your guest OS, evidently.