I have been doing more and more with Cisco ISE and it warranted a 2 node cluster at home. Everything was working great until the password on my local admin expired. To make matters worse, I forgot the CLI admin password… Thankfully there is a way to reset both!
To start, you will need to download or grab the ISO Installer for your version of Cisco ISE and upload it to your Datastore and mount it in the CD/DVD drive of your VM.
Once the ISO is mounted, you can boot to the ISO. You will be presented with four options, 2 for Installing ISE and 2 for System Utilities. Select Option 3.
Select Option 1 at the next prompt to Recover Administrator Password.
Once you have selected the name of your local administrator account, you will be prompted to enter a new password for the account.
Enter your new password and select Y to save your changes and exit. From there you can Quit and Reload by using Q.
After ISE has restarted, you should be able to log into the console or SSH (if enabled). If you also need to change the application user password you can use the following command:
application reset-passwd ise <name of admin>
Virtualized Taylor 