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Getting New Performance Overview Charts Working in VC2.5U4

One of the New features of vCenter 2.5 Update 4 is the “Performance Overview Charts”. But, if you do not follow the proper upgrade steps, it will not work properly. I am a big fan of the “Complete uninstall and install fresh” method. You can make sure all of the bits are gone before the upgrade. Obviously, you will need to make a backup copy of your license files and, if changes were made, the vpxd.cfg file.If you look at the release notes, you will see a link to a VMware Knowledgebase Article about how to get the charts working. It tells you that you will need to install the Java Development Kit6u11. You will also need to set path info into the environment, copy the files from the CD to a local disk and run install from there.

But there are those of us that will just download the zip file, uncompress it, and run setup.exe. No backups, no uninstall first. This is why VMware has several KB articles about how to get the charts working, depending on how you upgraded.

The first KB Article deals with not stopping the Web services first. Another KB Article deals with the need for an updated Oracle ODBC driver if you have an Oracle database.  Finally, for those of us living on the edge, there is a KB Article if you are suing the bundled SQL Express database.

So, here are my steps in a nutshell:

  1. Backup the databases, license file and (if needed) vpxd.cfg
  2. Uninstall the old version of vCenter, VUM, Converter, and Capacity Planner
  3. Install the Java Development Kit6u11
  4. Edit the environment path and append C:Program FilesJavajdk1.6.0_11bin
  5. Add a system variable of JAVA_HOME to point to C:Program FilesJavajdk1.6.0_11
  6. Install vCenter, pointing to the vCenter and VUM databases when prompted
  7. Copy the vpxperfCharts directory from the CD to local disk
  8. Run install.bat from vpxperfCharts on the local disk
  9. Uninstall Capacity Planner (You don’t need it by now, do you???)

Obviously, if you have your Program Files on a different drive or path than the default, it will need to be entered appropriately in steps 4 and 5.

Well, there you have it. Setup Performance Overview Charts in 9 easy steps.