hello!
So, my production vCO 5.5.1 instance is in need of an upgrade. Just to keep things as stable as possible, I'm planning on upgrading our production instance to 5.5.3, instead of going to 6.x or 7.x. Currently, we're running vCO 5.5.1 appliance backed by an Oracle database. The /etc/SuSE-release file says its version 11 patchlevel 2, which I guess is 11.2.
Approximately a year or so ago, I needed telnet and nmap, so I could do some network troubleshooting directly from the appliance, related mostly to workflow issues. Also wanted snmp so we could monitor the appliance. In order to do this, I pointed yast to the opensuse 11.2 repo, and then proceeded to get nmap, telnet, and net-snmp installed. This of course came with a bunch of package dependencies, which were also installed.
Fast forward to last week, and I took some scheduled downtime to upgrade this appliance to 5.5.3. This is when I ran into major package dependency issues during the upgrade process. The updatecli.log told me I had newer packages installed than what 5.5.3 comes with, which included some pretty deep dependencies like rpm. Try as I may, I could not find a good method to downgrade these packages back to the original, so I tried to "hack" around the problem. I tarred up the following directories:
/opt/vmware /var/lib/vco /usr/lib/vco /usr/java/jre-vmware /etc/vco /root
Then spun up a new vCO 5.5.1 instance, and untarred them into it. The instance came up, but lacked packages, workflows, configs, packages - basically everything. So much for trying to outsmart VMWare.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to reinstall vCO while preserving EVERYTHING except for the appliance OS?