Virtual Center Starts then Fails

[saunders]

Hey everybody, I am having a really tough issue and I was wondering if somebody could help me out. I have spent a while looking over all the documents I can find, with no help so far.

We are running Virtual Center 2.5u3 on a Windows 2003 R2 EE host, running with Sql Server 2005. After the upgrade from 2.5u2 to 2.5u3, I was having trouble with the Vmware VirtualCenter Service. When then service is started as a "Local System account", the service starts up just fine, but after about 5 seconds, the service fails. When I start the service as a local administrator account, the service starts up and runs just fine.

According to the vpxd-x.log, I am getting a "[VpxunhandledException] Win32 Exception Access Violation(0xc000005) detected at Data execution (8) error at address 000000". A few lines later, and I get a coreDump file and the service quits on me. When the service runs as a local admin, i dont get any of the win32 errors and things seems to run fine.

I have tried to repair the installation of Virtual Center, along with double and tripple checked my ODBC settings. Looking over the logs, it looks like communication between the service and the database is working fine. I dont have any other services running that would cause a port confliction.

I am at a lost as why things would work fine as a local admin account, but not work as a local system account. The host is joined to an Active Directory domain, but Virtual Center does not have any AD accounts registered with it.

My last ditch option is to backup and reinitilize the database, but I am trying to avoid that at all costs.

Thanks again for any assistance

Saunders

[Troy_Clavell]

if you haven't seen this KB, maybe it will be helpful

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003926

[saunders]

Thanks for posting that link Troy. Unfortunatly I have tried all the steps on that site and still no luck.

[Troy_Clavell]

if you have gone through the entire KB then probably you are right, you may want to start from scratch. One thing you can try is install your vCenter Server seperate from your DB server. If it's a hardware issue, run your vCenter server as a VM.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_vc_in_vm.pdf

[saunders]

I called up VMware support and they werent able to help me to much in the situation. Here is a list of all the things I have tried. I have one or two more things to try, but I am running out of ideas.

1) Reinstalled VirtualCenter. I didnt re-initialize the database, but otherwise a complete reinstall. The virtual center service still crashed out while running as local system. Ran fine under local admin

2) Tried running the service as another local administrator. That didnt work.

3) Did an indepth analysis of the vpx logs with VC logging turned up to max (trivial logging). The log messages look like everything is running fine, then out of no where, you get a message about a VPX Exception and it crashes. It crashes twice, producing two core-dumps before it actually stops running.

4) Tried running the service as a domain admin. No luck there either

5) Verified that all of my esx servers have proper VMware SSL certificates and no warning messages are thrown for a hostname mismatch.

6) Verified that all services that seem like that they should be logically on, are running.

7) Double checked settings on other Virtual Centers to compare to the problem virtual center. Nothing jumped out at me.

😎 Made sure I had the most current version of the java jre/jdk. Didnt seem to help much.

So, after all of that, I dont have allot of ideas. I am goign to try to start with a fresh database, to see if that is working. I am going to stand up a second, fresh db along side the primary db and see if that fixes the problem.

Anyways, Thanks for the suggestions Troy. I will let you know what I figure out

Saunders

[saunders]

I decided to setup a brand new clean and fresh database, reinstall Virtual Center, and point it to the new Database. After installation, the service came right up under the "Local service" account instead of the Administrator Account. So, i went ahead and rebuilt the entire Virtual Infrastructure, including esx servers, resource pools, permissions, etc. This wasnt my prefered solution, but it at least fixed the problem and got me going again.

Thanks for the help

Saunders