I recently ran into an issue where my vCenter Server Service failed to stay running. It would start and run for about 20 seconds and then stop with no good errors/info in the event logs. Digging into the vpxd logs on the vCenter server I found errors like below. The root problem was caused by renaming an Active Directory group, which vCenter didn't like. Since we automaticly by GPO place certain AD groups into the local admins group on every server, i have restricted my vCenter administrators. So in vCenter i added an AD group orginally called MHCCVC_VirtualCenter_Admins_DLS and gave them Administrator rights in vCenter. I then change the built-in vCenter Administrators group to only have Virtual Machine Advanced User rights. Well, yesterday I change my "MHCCVC_VirtualCenter_Admins_DLS" to "MHCCVC_vCenter_Admins_DLS" and then when trying to restart my vCenter server it wouldn't start up correctly again. Turns out a name change in AD is not reflected in vCenter and thus the name stored in the VCDB is wrong and causes issues so then it trys to revert back to the built-in Administrators group, which i restricted and so the service shuts down. Following KB 1008114 will walk you though how to correct this and get back into vCenter. Once in, you can correctly readd your newly named group(s) and re-adjust permissions. Or, if you read this post ahead of time just add the newly named group(s) first and then delete the old named groups in vCenter before a restart and you should be fine.
Issues/Problems you may experiance:
VMware VirtualCenter Server service starts, then fails immediately. The vpxd logs contain the following error message:
2009-01-05 19:36:37.130 'App' 12216 verbose Recording (27c2b88:0) update vpx_sequence set id = ? where name = ?
2009-01-05 19:36:37.130 'App' 12216 verbose Recording (27c2a38:0) INSERT INTO VPX_ACCESS (ID, PRINCIPAL, ROLE_ID, ENTITY_ID, FLAG) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)
2009-01-05 19:36:37.130 'App' 12216 error Failed to add default permission: permission already exists
2009-01-05 19:36:37.130 'App' 12216 error Cannot start authorize - system has no access rules
2009-01-05 19:36:37.146 'App' 12216 error Failed to initialize: <Authorize Exception>
2009-01-05 19:36:37.146 'App' 12216 error Failed to initialize security
2009-01-05 19:36:37.146 'App' 12216 info Shutting down VMware VirtualCenter...
2009-01-05 19:36:38.146 'App' 12216 info Exit done.
