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bradleys
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-17-2009 02:23 PM

ESX 3i "Failed to install the VirtualCenter Agent service."

Hi Everyone,

We have 24 HP DL360 G5 systems with ESX 3i running on embedded HP USB Keys (everything is on the VMWare ESX 3i HCL). This morning after opening VC and going to do some maintenance work, I noticed 1 of the 3i hosts had become 'Not Contactable'. All 24 hosts have an individual userland swap volume on our SAN (HP MSA2212FC, Also on the VMWare ESX HCL) to allow them to join our production cluster.

After trying my usual of disconnecting and then attempting to re-connect the host machine, I got the error 'Failed to install the VirtualCentre Agent service.'

The host is contactable, on the same subnet as the VC server and had about 12 VM's running on it while showing it was disconnected, all the guest machines were fully contactable.

Even after a reboot, I don't seem to be able to add this host back to our cluster, I just keep getting the 'Failed to install the VirtualCentre Agent service.' error.

Just wondering if anyone has come across a similar issue with 3i before?

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3 Replies
Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal
‎02-17-2009 09:01 PM

Welcome to the VMware Community forums. Would these happen to be green case USB drives?

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1139505#1139505

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1111418#1111418

bradleys
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-18-2009 01:53 PM

Thanks for the info, a few things there worth having a look at, the USB keys in question are all the black plastic USB keys, I do have the recovery disk's for these, so, I'm wondering if the issue is just with one of those random flaky bits of solid state storage you come across from time to time.

If that fail's I'll possibly ask HP for a replacement key and see if that does the trick.

Thanks for your help

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truo1van
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-05-2010 12:10 AM

Hi,

I have the exact same prob 3 weeks ago. We run on Dell 2950 III. Started out with HA error. "Reconfigure HA" did not help, lead to "Faill to sinatll VC agent/service". Dropped out of VC.

ENd up replacing the USB key. Since then we have had 2 other incidents of same HA error.

1 strange thing is: VMs running on the problemed ESX host started to drop in and out of network, that was how we got alerted to by out sysadmin people (did not have VM Heartbeat turned on). I had to shutdown the VMs and re-added them on the running hosts. Reboot of the host worked this time but not sure for how long.

We are going to rebuild the hosts on HDs RAID1. USB keys are too risky, to me.

Happy to hear your input pls

chrs

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