When you want to upgrade VMware Cloud Director you need to have the <admin_username>. At least, that’s what it says when you follow the official documentation.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to these credentials. The only credentials I had were for the root account. But it turned out you can also do the upgrade with only the root account credentials.

You can follow the steps in the official documentation but when you come to step 2 you have to make a change.

Change this:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u <admin_username> cell --shutdown

To this:

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool cell -i `cat /var/run/vmware-vcd-cell.pid` --shutdown

This new command takes the process id from the running cell instead of the admin_username (-u). I copied this trick from this website.