Today I’ve been troubleshooting a weird problem with a VMware Update Manager installation. VMware Update Manager was installed with a different port than usual because IIS was already running on the server.

When trying to install the plugin the following error appeared:

Unable to connect to the remote server

I would have expected that in either extension.xml or vci-integrity.xml in the VUM installation directory I would find a misconfigured option but this clearly wasn’t the case. Next stop: the vCenter database.

After clicking around in the database I wanted to run a query, but I still needed to find out which table the rows belonged to. I didn’t wanted to click every single table and start querying so I gave SQL this procedure a chance. The procedure is pretty straight forward, it gives you the option to enter a search string and search the entire database instead of doing “select * from emp” everytime.

EXEC SearchAllTables ‘vum-servername’

After running this procedure I found two entries which still contained the old port values which I updated with the following query:

update VPX_EXT_CLIENT set URL = ‘http://vumserver.yellow-bricks.com:8081/vci/downloads/VMware-UMClient.exe’ where Ext_Client_ID = ‘3′

I did some Oracle SQL courses back in the day when I still worked for Oracle, this is probably the first time I ever used it in real life though.