more vSphere pain... (and education!)

Coming soon - an investigation into vCentre 4 (upgraded from 3.5) misbehaviour. vCentre and Update Manager services will not start after a reboot...


Update 1 - up until 2am this morning trying to get vCentre4 to work properly. it's a "fill your boots" install with Guided Consolidation, Update Manager, Convertor; and all on a local SQL Express (or MSDE as I still incorrectly think of it :-)). Anyway, last week the upgrade to VI4 went well, and over the weekend I upgraded the ESX hosts to 4 and patched them.


Then I rebooted the entire infrastructure - a kind of defence mechanism for me after changes of this nature to make sure it all works. And it didn't. ESX4 hosts were fine, but I could no longer access the vCentre4 box.

Seems the Virtual Centre service would no longer start. I found a some pages on the net, that suggested timing could be an issue with a local SQL Express db, and advised waiting and starting the service again. That sort of worked, but not consistently, and nothing would make Update Manager service start.


So I hunted around and found an old 3.5 executable. Mike Laverick thinks this is probably a red herring (and with further experimentation I think I agree). But VMwareUpdateServiceClient.exe was running. As soon as I killed it, Update Manager service would start.
So late on Sunday I decided to build a new, fresh vCentre4 box. Still a local db, but “clean out of the box”. And got the same damn problem! Nothing would make the service start… Even running a script to start every 10 minutes, and running that for a few hours. Worse – nothing in the event logs, and nothing in the VMware logs that I could find.


As I type, I’m building a SQL 2005 box to take my old db from the upgraded vi3-vCentre4 box (so schema already up to date, and content OK), and then try pointing the clean vCentre4 box to it. May not finish that immediately.


More later, but in the meantime Marillion and King Crimson over Spotify are keeping me sane (and diverted from the work I really should be doing)…