Looks like I get to solve my own problem here... I realized entry since the vCO appliance was trying to connect to the database server by name, I could add an entry to /etc/hosts to redirect the old db host name to the new one. Once I did that, I was able to boot the appliance and properly configure it to the new DB host.
This is possibly not the best solution or one that would work in every situation, but it did the trick.
Jason