I'm working for a difficult customer who has a host whose root password expired. They changed the password but didn't record it and of course, the host is disconnected from vCenter.

This host has 'critical' VMs residing on it. Since the host profile method isn't an option to change the password here, and I don't have console access to the host, I believe the only course of action is to shut down the VMs, remove the 'dead' host from the cluster and re-register the VMs on a different host.

I haven't had to do anything like this in ages, back when the option existed to 'Add to Inventory'. Today when right-clicking the VMX in the datastore browser, I'm only presented with an option to re-register the VM. I'm under the impression that re-registering the VMs on a different host in the cluster will work if the 'dead' host is removed from the cluster. Can anyone confirm that for me? As stated in the subject, the VMs live on datastores connected to all hosts in the cluster.

Thanks!