Resurrected from the dead: Why it is sometimes better to repair vCOps

Today I was at a customers site. My attention was initially directed on a vCOps deployment. vCOps is a good startpoint if you need a quick overview over a vSphere environment. Unfortunately vCOps wasn’t working any more. The license was expired and the login page wasn’t accessable, but the admin login page was workingI restarted the vApp but this doesn’t solve the problem. The customer owns a VMware vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus license and it would be a shame, if he wouldn’t use vCOps in his environment (> 15 hosts).

Initial thought: Delete the vApp and deploy a new vCOps. Second thought: Haven’t I forgotten anything? A short shout into the Twittersphere should give me an answer.

While waiting for replies I asked the VMware Knowledge Base and found KB2036389 (Uninstalling vCenter Operations Manager). This KB article states that I should unregister vCOps from the vCenter instance before I shut down and delete the vApp. To unregister the vCOps, you have to login with the admin account. This leads me to the second problem: The password for the admin account was unknown. No problem if you have the login for the root account. VMware offers KB2078313 (Resetting the Administrator password in VMware vCenter Operations Manager appliance) to address this problem. After trying some passwords I found the right one for the admin account and I was able to login. A wizard came up and asked for credentials to access the vCenter instance. After a couple of minutes the vCOps 5.7 was still unlicensed, but alive agin. In the meantime, I had received some answers on Twitter. Both positions were represented: Simply delete and remove cleanly. Because the vCOps was running again, I did the upgrade to 5.8.3 and SLES 11 SP3. A really good reason why it was right not to delete the vCOps came from Raiko.

The loss of the historical data can be painful. In my case preserving the data was a nice benefit and so it was the right decision to try to repair the vCOps. Let me be clear: The customer hadn’t used vCOps until today. The vApp was running in the background. Therefore nothing was customized. Another important aspect came from Craig:

If you have spent hours for the configuration, reporting etc it’s not an option to re-deploy the vCOps vApp. In this case, it is important that all changes are documented. A second option is to restore from a backup (VADP compatible like Veeam B&R, HP Data Protector, CommVault Simpana etc.).