VMWare v6.0 to 6U1 or 6U2 Upgrade - External PSC - 1603 Errors on vCenter Server

[deastley1]

Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone has come across upgrading a VMWare v6.0 install to U1 or U2 upgrade and received a 1603 error.

The install executes fine on the external PSC, but when executed against the vCenter Server fails and presents a 1603 error and does a rollback.

Installation of component VCSServiceManager failed with error code '1603'. Check the logs for more details

I have tried all the other threads suggesting to have .net 3.5 installed, the ipv4 stack, and the database permissions but are all there.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[deastley1 · Accepted solution]

For those that come across this issue in the future the way i resolved this was:

Issue was connected to the VMWare SysLog Collector Service. There is an issue with the new syslogcollection MSI being able to upgrade, uninstall or reinstall over the legacy one.

Easiest way to resolve this is to remove the reference of the old syslog collector service from the Windows Installer Library. The way i did this was to use the legacy Windows Installer Clean Up Utility.

Post removing this, the installation proceeded as planned and passed "Installing VCSServiceManager".

If you come across this issue - you can test it by attempting to execute the syslogcollector msi contained in the vCenter Binaries directory.

[CKilinski]

Thank you very much - this resolved the issue for me as well.

[Skeetneet]

I've been struggling with this issue for two weeks when upgrading to U2A build 4541947, and finally support came through with a solution.

In our case, the cause was vCenter JRE not being updated correctly.

To workaround the issue, remove the contents of the jre and then perform the upgrade.

Steps:

1. Stop all vCenter services.
2. Take a backup of jre folder located at C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\
3. Empty the contents of  jre folder except for the below files :

C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\jre\bin\libvecsjni.dll

C:\Program Files\VMware\\vCenter Server\jre\lib\ext\vmware-endpoint-certificate-store.jar

4. Perform an upgrade to vCenter Server Update 2a.