Change vcoadmin password on vCenter Orchestrator 5.5

I recently had to upgrade vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) from 5.1.2 to 5.5.2, and there isn’t a way to do an in place upgrade so you have to deploy a new vCO 5.5 appliance and migrate to it.  First you need to export the configuration of your vCO 5.1.2 appliance from the vCO configuration web portal and then import the configuration into the new vCO 5.5 appliance.  I’m using the local LDAP server for authentication and one of the issues that I ran into was with the vcoadmin password (default password is ‘vcoadmin’).  When you import the configuration into the new vCO appliance, it will fill in the vcoadmin password from the vCO 5.1 appliance.  If this password isn’t ‘vcoadmin’, you will get errors for the Authentication section of the vCO configuration web portal:

You can enter the password of ‘vcoadmin’ in both the Authentication and Plug-in sections to make everything green, but if you need to change this password, you’ll need to do it from the vCO appliance’s console.

I found this article (http://www.vcoportal.de/2012/03/change-the-password-for-vcoadmin-on-vco-appliance/) that explains how to change the password but it’s from 2012 and when I tried to run it I received:

vco-upgrade:~ # ldappasswd -D “cn=vcoadmin,ou=vco,dc=appliance” -W -S

New password:
Re-enter new password:
Enter LDAP Password:
ldap_bind: Invalid DN syntax (34)
additional info: invalid DN

I was able to successfully reset the password by running:

ldappasswd -x -D "cn=vcoadmin,ou=vco,dc=appliance" -w current-password -s new-password "cn=vcoadmin,ou=vco,dc=appliance"

If you didn’t change the vcoadmin password in the vCO configuration web portal, it will turn green after a few seconds.  If not, you can try to update it with the new password.