Remove vCenter Orchestrator Plugin

It is really easy to install a vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) plugin but not as easy to uninstall a plugin since you can’t do it from the use interface (UI) where you install and manage your plug-ins.
However, uninstalling a vCO plugin is not something i have to do on a daily basis but it happened last week. My customer installed the plugin we were suppose to use for the vCO-IPAM integration (Infoblox) but it turned out it was a “bad version”.

The rest of the post will explain the steps i took when removing the bad Infoblox plugin from my vCO 5.5 appliance.

1. Log in to the appliance using SSH
2. Go to the directory, “/usr/lib/vco/app-server/plugins”, where the plugin file, “o11nplugin-ipam.dar”,  is located and deleted it using the rm command:
3. Restart both the vCO service and vCO configuration server via the Startup option in the vCO configuration UI (https://vCO-appliance-fqdn:8283). In my case https://vco01.vcdx56.com:8283.
4. Log in with the vCO client and go to the “Package” view.
5. Right click the com.infoblox.ipam package and select “Delete element with content”.
   
6. Repete the restart steps described in paragraph 3.
7. Now when the old plugin is gone i uploaded and installed the correct plugin version like we normally do when installing a vCO plugin.
   

VMware has a KB article describing a general delete vCO plugin procedure which also covers the Windows based vCO version. You can find the KB here.