Plain Virtualization

Previously I mentioned I help one of my customer to reinstate back their Windows vCenter Server here . They have use the Windows Local Account to have the vCenter Server services started on instead of creating an AD service account. Recently, they did a reboot of the Windows Server after a Windows update. The vCenter Server services was not able to start. When using the vSphere Web Client, they got this error " 503 Service Unavailable " similar to what is stated in this KB . You might wonder what can cause a vCenter Server service with just a reboot. As stated in the KB, this can be due to the removal of permission to allow the account running the service with Log on as a batch job . Do make sure when your Windows Server is joined to a domain, the rights need to be assigned explictly for this machine as your Group Policy can revert this if you are uncertain. Else create a service account to run the servce and ensure the permission is provided.

Recently, assisted one of my customer to troubleshoot a failed Windows vCenter Server resulted from an upgrade failure. What you would need is all the credential accounts such as vCenter SSO, Windows Administrator and your MS SQL account. Also a copy of your existing vCenter Server database. We logged a case with VMware support and gone through the logs. Refer to the logs location here . The one major log would be the vmdird.log. This was showing error 49. The VMware Service Lifecycle Manager service remain freeze at Starting status. This will run a vmon process in your task manager. Check out the all services name here . For those not aware, starting from vCenter Server 6.5, the vCenter Server Services are no longer a standalone services. We spend a lot of time trying to reinstall, and running through kb fixes but it did not help. We decided to do a uninstall and encounter error 1603. We were not able to get over this error.  Instead, we did another vCenter Server installation on ...