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mroszkowski
Contributor
Contributor

vCenter Server Service dies when adding host

I've recently upgraded my full version (not appliance) vCenter Server from 5.0 to 5.1 (Build 947673.)

As I upgraded my hosts from 5.0 U1 to 5.1.0 (Build 799733) I noticed the vCenter Server Service dying whenever the host being upgraded re-established its connection with my vCenter Server.  It typically happens whenever the ESXi Host is re-establishing it's iSCSI connections to my SAN for the various datastores.

At first I thought it was when the ESXi Host establishes its connection to my SAN to mount its scratch volume.  At the time the vCenter Server (a VM) had its vmdk files on the same datastore as the ESXi Host's Scratch, so I moved the scratch for all my hosts to a separate volume and datastore.  The problem persists.

Then I thought it may be the Dell Mutli-Path Extension Module.  The module was out-dated so I upgraded it to the latest release (1.1.2,) which is confirmed to work with ESXi 5.1.  The problem persists.

I am currently using update manager to patch my newly upgraded hosts and I can only do them one at a time because when the host re-establishes its connection to vCenter after remediation the vCenter Server Service dies and the remediation task dies with it.

I don't know where in Windows to look for the vCenter logs as there's nothing in the Event Log Viewer pertaining to the vCenter Server Service crashing.

What's even more frustraiting is that the vCenter Server service will sometimes crash with no obvious triggering event, usually sometime at night when no-one is watching.

Is anyone else experiencing these symptoms?

Where should I look for usefull log data?

Cheers!         

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Sreejesh_D
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

the vCenter Logs are located in %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs\.  (ref http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102180...)

L ook at the latest to vpxd.log to know the reason for vpxd crash. We can see the crash details at the bottom of the file which created immediately the vCenter Service stopeed.

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