When using an Azure VM, why am I getting “Cannot Find Certificate with thumbprint” when trying to reset admin password with VMAccessAgent?

Question

I am trying to change the admin password for an Azure VM. I am not able to log on to the VM remotely. What I've tried:

• The password reset tool located in the Azure Portal for the VM
• Set-AzVMAccessExtension via Powershell in the Azure Cloud Shell

Both return the following:

Failed to reset password VM has reported a failure when processing extension 'VMAccessAgent'. Error message: "Parsing Extension protected settings failed. Exception : Cannot find certificate with thumbprint '[Thumbprint Snipped]' to decrypt protected settings."

Has anyone encountered this situation in an Azure VM? If so, what can be done to remedy this error and reset the admin password OR add an admin user to the account?

Answer 1

To answer this, in case anyone stumbles upon it looking for an answer, I had to do the offline password reset method outlined in Azure documentation:

Reset local Windows password for Azure VM offline

It wasn't that painful if you go slow and methodically, but as there was something misconfigured on the VM instance that was seemingly beyond my control, this was the only recourse. And while yes, this is probably better suited to ServerFault, I will leave it here to help anyone that runs into a similar situation.