I have inherited a vCenter Server Appliance that appeared to be working fine until it automagically updated one night to version 5.1. I find all kinds of information here on how to fix specific issues, but none of them appear to resolve the issue at hand, (vpxd won't start up) and my boss says to go ahead and install a new vCenter server based on Windows. But I'm sure there must be a way to fix the exising system! It uses local SSO only, and I can ssh into the system, and I can connect to the web UI and have already set up an upload repository based on the .zip-file update instructions -- but the link to do the actual install is grayed out, since the machine thinks it is already updated to the 5.1U1c version. Something went wrong, because the vmware-vpxd now fails to start, and the problem appears to be deep inside the guts of some java process.
So how can I force the system to simply reinstall the latest update from my own repository, so that it can fix whatever broke the last time it tried to update?
Thanks for any ideas,
CA