I was recently going through a vCenter upgrade and got stuck at an error Exception occurred in postinstallHook. I tried reverting from snapshot and trying again but i ran through the same issue.

Installation failed at postInstallHook with an exception.

The issue in my case was that the catalina.properties had the wrong permissions. The fix was to change the permissions to perfcharts:cis and then resuming the update in the VAMI interface. The catalina.properties is located /usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/tc-instance/conf/catalina.properties. The command to fix it is

chown perfcharts:cis /usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/tc-instance/conf/catalina.properties

Then restart the vmware-perfcharts service by running:

service-control --stop vmware-perfcharts
service-control --start vmware-perfcharts