vCloud Director Appliance 5.5 – Access to Embedded Oracle

Today it was the time to tear down my lab and rebuild it from bottom up. I wanted to be up to date with vSphere 5.5 and vCloud Director 5.5 to get a better knowledge of the most recent release and its features. Unfortunately, due to my personal budget contraints for the lab, it is a single node setup which turns out to be a problem when it comes to vCloud Director: vCD has to “prepare” the host which means it’s going to put it into maintenance mode to install VIBs containing the vCloud Agent. Well, obviously I cannot put the same host into maintenance mode that vCloud Director, vCenter and all other VMs run on.  😉

Anyway, I had to get access to my vCloud Director Appliance’s embedded database to work around this problem. I found good instructions here but unfortunately, they didn’t work for me:

export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH
export ORACLE_SID=XE
sqlplus vcloud/VCloud

It resulted in the following error message:

ERROR:
ORA-12547: TNS: lost contact

At first, I thought it was just a matter of wrong credentials and already suspected VMware to have changed them. Some research revealed this was actually a problem caused by the user account I was running sqlplus under: root. Looking at the binary of sqlplus, I could see the owner of the file was “oracle”, so I changed my user to “oracle” – evoila:

su - oracle
sqlplus vcloud/VCloud
...
SQL>

Now it’s time to get the host “prepared” manually. I’ll let you know how that worked out soon!