I'm setting up a vCenter 5.5 appliance. The installation went great and I was able to join AD, change the root pw and log back in with it. However, I can't log in as administrator@vsphere.local. The error is "Unable to authenticate user. Please try again." I was able to successfully change the password through the web interface, but I still can't in. I fired up ssh and generated a new pw with vdcadmintool, but I couldn't get in with it. The generated pw is hard to read because it uses 1, l, O and 0, not to mention ampersand which is documented as a disallowed character (!?!), so I generated a new one. Pretty sure I'm typing it correctly, but still no luck.
The catch 22 is that I need to log in as local admin so that I can set up the AD ldap authentication.
Any ideas? I see a lot of posts about people not being able to get in as root, but as I say, no problems for me with root.