A few days ago I had the pleasure of fixing a severely hosed vCenter Operations Manager box.  After resolving all of the issues, the last thing to do was to install the latest update.

The intention was not only to bring the version from 5.8.2 up to 5.8.4, but also to update the underlying SUSE install to SP3.  However to do this you need root access, and somewhere along the way I’d fat-fingered the password one too many times and locked the root account out.

Whilst I was confident it would unlock after a period of time, no matter how long I left it (admittedly not twenty four hours) it still refused to unlock.

With being an RHEL fanboi I’m not familiar with SUSE, but luckily I still had console access by way of the Admin account.

The unlock was actually trivially simple.  Logged in as Admin, use:

sudo pam_tally2 --user=root --reset

And that was it – I was back in. After that I copied the .pak upgrade file over using SSH and initiated the OS upgrade:

/usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/conf/upgrade/va_sles11_spx_init.sh /data/VMware-vcops-SP2-1381807.pak

This did the following:

1. Stop vCenter Operations Manager services
2. Copy the .pak file to the Analytics VM
3. Update the Analytics VM
4. Update the UI VM

After a while both UI and Analytics VMs came back and the upgrade was complete.