Short after vCops 5.8 was released I upgraded, all went smooth. But then the other day, I had to restart the appliance, after waiting a while and I was still not able to login to the web gui. I open up a console to the two VMs, only to see the both VMs were stuck at boot waiting for a password change. So I typed in the old password and a new one and shortly after vCops was up and running again.

 

Well as it turns out had I just read the release notes properly, I would have know that with release of vCops 5.8 there’s been changes to the password policy, which can lead to this case where the VMs wont boot and are stuck waiting for password change.

 

From the release notes:

Some vCenter Operations Manager services fail to start following upgrade to vCenter Operations Manager 5.8
In compliance with STIG, vCenter Operations Manager 5.8 implements a new security hardening measure that sets a password expiration period for the vCenter Operations Manager admin user. In the upgrade log, check for the message "admin user password has expired".
Workaround: If your vCenter Operations Manager password is more than 365 days old, change the password before upgrading. In addition, the new password must fit the stronger password policy required for vCenter Operations Manager 5.8