A clean new deployment of the era_appliance.ova version: 6.5.31.0 complains that the OS is out of date.
Upgrading the OS by going to the terminal and running "yum update", successfully upgrades the OS.
Then upon rebooting, ERA is dead!!. When you login to the ERA Web Interface it returns:
Connection has failed with state 'Not connected'
The problem in my case appears in the logs as so:
2018-05-14 21:34:23 Error: CDatabaseModule [Thread 7fb81deef740]: Probing database connection failed. Next connection attempt will be in 10 seconds. 1 more attempt will be made. The database access layer reported: [unixODBC][Driver Manager]Can't open lib 'MySQL ODBC 5.3 Unicode Driver' : file not found (0)
I resolved this by appending the lines below to:
/etc/odbcinst.ini
[MySQL ODBC 5.3 Unicode Driver]
Driver=/usr/lib64/libmyodbc8a.so
UsageCount=1
And re/starting the eraserver service
service eraserver restart
You should now be able to login to the ERA Web interface
I hope this information helps someone else
