Upgrading vCenter Operations Manager OS to SLES 11 SP2

With the release of vCenter Operations Manager 5.8 (now at 5.8.1), an upgrade to the appliance’s underlying OS also needs a bit of patch, which makes sense since SLES 11 has been out for a while (January 2013). It’s a pretty simple upgrade, but you have to do it from the OS itself, not the vC Ops admin console.

  1. Download the .pak file My VMware
    Screen Shot 2014-04-13 at 1.42.36 PM
  2. Take a snapshot of the UI and Analytics VMs
  3. Copy the file to the /data directory of the UI VM.
    1. Linux:
      scp VMware-vcops-SP2-1381807.pak root@ip_address_of_webui:/data
      
    2. Windows (WinSCP) (make sure to use ‘root’ and not ‘admin’)
      winscp1Screen Shot 2014-04-13 at 1.53.04 PM
  4. SSH or putty to the UI VM as root not as admin
  5. Start the upgrade with the command:
    /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/conf/upgrade/va_sles11_sp2_init.sh /data/VMware-vcops-SP2-1381807.pak
    

    This will:

    1. Stop vC Ops services
    2. Copy the PAK file to the Analytics VM
    3. Update the Analytics VM
    4. Update the UI VM
    
    vcops-ui:~ # /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/conf/upgrade/va_sles11_sp2_init.sh /data/VMware-vcops-SP2-1381807.pak
    Started applying upgrade..
    Stopping vCOPs services...
    VMware-vcops-SP2-1381807.pak 100% 3201MB 27.6MB/s 01:56
    Starting SLES upgrade on Analytics VM
    Successfully added SLES 11 SP2 repository.
    Starting SLES 11 SP2 upgrade...Please wait until the upgrade is complete..
    Successfully applied va_hardening component
    Shutting down SSH daemon..done
    Starting SSH daemon..done
    Correct common-auth symlinks
    Completed.
    Successfully completed SLES upgrade on Analytics VM
    Starting SLES upgrade on UI VM
    Successfully added SLES 11 SP2 repository.
    Starting SLES 11 SP2 upgrade...Please wait until the upgrade is complete..
    Successfully applied va_hardening component
    Shutting down SSH daemon done
    Starting SSH daemon done
    Correct common-auth symlinks
    Completed.
    Successfully completed SLES upgrade on UI VM
    Completed applying upgrade..Please restart the vAPP for completion...
    
  6. Restart the vApp
  7. Verify that the vC Ops comes back up and runs
  8. Remove the snapshots – do not let the Analytics VM run on a snapshot for more than 24 hours or you’ll pay for it when you remove it.

2 thoughts on “Upgrading vCenter Operations Manager OS to SLES 11 SP2

    • I believe you can. It’s just an install source file. Easy to put back if it breaks :-)

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