Update Manager Service not starting on boot

[sjwk]

My vCenter server has an issue in that the vSphere Update Manager service fails to start on boot, although it does start fine manually.

Everything looks normal, and have just reinstalled (updated) all of vCenter to 5.1u1a but that didn't solve the issue.

On boot, event logs show:

"A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the VMware vSphere Update Manager Service service to connect.", followed by "service did not respond to start request in a timely fashion".

The service is set to run as Local System Account, and set for automatic startup.  Manually starting the service works fine.

There are also log entries a few minutes later:

"A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the VMware VirtualCenter Server service to connect." (however that service is running after boot)

"The VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service service terminated with service-specific error Incorrect function.."

The vCenter server itself is a physical machine (dual 2.8Ghz, 4Gb) running Server 2008R2 and only running vCenter.

Looked in the update manager logs and nothing.

Anyone have any thoughts on things to check?

Thanks,

Steve.

[raog]

Does setting the service to start "delayed" instead of "automatic" help?

Regards

Girish

[sjwk]

Thanks for the suggestion.

No - that was one thing I already tried with no success, although that was before I updated the update manager so I will try again just to be sure.

Steve.

Edit: just to confirm: no, that still made no difference, still fails to start on boot when set to delayed.

[raog]

Is your DB remote or on the same machine?

Regards

Girish

[sjwk]

Same machine.

Steve.

[sjwk]

I've worked around the issue for now, by upping the service timeout to 2 minutes through adding a registry key to override (HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Current\ServicesPipeTimeout), which appears to have sorted it.

Not entirely happy with that as a permanent solution as shouldn't need to do that, but it does suggest it's something on the server (maybe AV is blocking services from running until it has started?) than an issue with the service itself (unless it's something that adding a dependency would fix - in the same way that vCenter service used to timeout before it had a dependency on the SQLServer service).

Steve.