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
   
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’)
      
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.