I have exactly the same problem and took your advice and looked in the log files. To cut a long story short the service fails because it can't find 'Administrator' in the 'Domain Admins' group in Active Directory.

Why? Well the server I am usign is a French server and hence a French Active Directory where the corresponding accounts are 'Administrateur' and 'Admins du Domaine'.

Questions:

1. Do I need to install VC Server on an English server?
or
2. Can I "localise" the VS Server service to look for the correct user/group.

Thanks in advance.

Matthew

No chance to do that as my 'test' server is a Domain Controller, hence NO LOCAL ADMIN account.

Like I say the log explicitly states that it fails as it cannot interrogate the 'Domain Admins' group in the Active Directory...mine is named 'Admins du Domaine'.

Any other ideas?

I encountered the same problem with ORACLE 10G, but with message:Failed to initialize database: ODBC error: ()
After browsing some logs I found out: column CREATED_TIME in Table VPX_ALARM_RUNTIME contains wrong data or wrong date-format or the reading program miss-interprets this column.
If I erase this column VC 2 Server starts successfully and the contents of VPX_ALARM_RUNTIME gets new entries and can be displayed via VC Client. So I guess the startup routines have trouble with this column CREATED_TIME.
So my workaround is to clear table VPX_ALARM_RUNTIME before restarting VC2.
VC2 runs on W2K3 German and ORACLE 10G on AIX with NLS_LANGUAGE AMERICAN NLS_TERRITORY AMERICA NLS_CHARACTERSET WE8ISO8859P1

Any suggestions are welcomed

Harry

I have also come across the same Windows event log message when starting the VC service:

The description for Event ID ( 1000 ) in Source ( VMware VirtualCenter Server ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: Failed to intialize VMware VirtualCenter. Shutting down....

The problem in my case was the SQL2000 server where I had configured the VC database happened to be only SP3 and everytime i tried to start the VC service i would get the above event logged.

I upgraded the SQL2000 server to SP4 as stated in the VC docs, the service started with no issues.

MP

I had the same error message even with SQL2000 SP4. I found out that VirtualCenter service couldn't connect to SQL database because I was forced to rename hostname. So I went thru the Windows registry and replaced all old references. I noticed that VirtualCenter AND SQL registries had an old references. Once I renamed all registry entries and booted the Windows server then everything was working and service didn't stopped anymore.
Hope this helps someone with this error...

I was having the same issue:

The description for Event ID ( 1000 ) in Source ( VMware VirtualCenter Server ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: Failed to intialize VMware VirtualCenter. Shutting down....

Running on an IBM Blade HS20, Win Server 2003 SE SP1, with VC 2.01 Build 32042.

I finally found a log file "twgescli.log" under "C:\Program Files\IBM\Director\Log" which referenced some VirtualCenter libraries. So as a test, I shut down the IBM Director Agent services and attempted to start VC. It came up cleanly, after which I restarted the IBM Diretcor Agent services. Those came up without error as well.

I got the same issue that the VirtualCenter Server Service was starting and ending after a few seconds without any error messages.

I resolved that problem through changing the logon credential of the service. I changed the credentials from "local System" to the local Administrator Accout and everything was working fine again.

Maybe this will solve your problems too.