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lamothe
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Cannot start VirtualCenter Server service

I just installed VirtualCenter 2.5 on a brand new Windows Server. Our repository is Oracle 10g R2 running on a separate UNIX server. When we installed VCS it went fine and the schema was created in the oracle database, so I am pretty sure there is no problem with database connectivity. We have verified that the license server is running and is using the correct license file, and we have verified that the license file is valid with the VMware license file checker.

We have also verified that IIS is not installed/running on the server so we don't think there is port contention.

The Windows Application event log simply says "The description for Event ID ( 1000 ) in Source...cannot be found."

Any ideas why our VirtualCenter Server service will not start? Seems that most of the time the problem is database connectivity, license file problems or port contention but that doesn't seem to be the case with us.

Thanks.

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Jae_Ellers
Virtuoso
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What do the VC logs say?

Virtual Center Logs*

  • Location: %TEMP%\vpx (relative to the user account running vpxd)

  • Name: vpxd-#.log (# is one digit, 0-9)

  • vpxd-index contains the # of the currently active log file

*shamelessly stolen from vmwarewolf:

Also check from p. 34 on using the vpxd.conf to control logging.

If you need to get into the sql check sql logging later in the file.

  1. Look for errors in the logs

  2. Jack the logging to verbose or trivia per above

  3. Look some more

  4. Post parts of the logs if you think you see something.

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Jae_Ellers
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
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What do the VC logs say?

Virtual Center Logs*

  • Location: %TEMP%\vpx (relative to the user account running vpxd)

  • Name: vpxd-#.log (# is one digit, 0-9)

  • vpxd-index contains the # of the currently active log file

*shamelessly stolen from vmwarewolf:

Also check from p. 34 on using the vpxd.conf to control logging.

If you need to get into the sql check sql logging later in the file.

  1. Look for errors in the logs

  2. Jack the logging to verbose or trivia per above

  3. Look some more

  4. Post parts of the logs if you think you see something.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- http://blog.mr-vm.com http://www.vmprofessional.com -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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mforbes
Enthusiast
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Great question.

I have found that database connectivity will cause that error. First, I would test the Oracle connection to make sure you can, if that works then make sure you have created (and tested) an ODBC connection to that database. If you can connect via an ODBC connection, then there is no reason you should be having issues connecting.

Mike Forbes

Mike Forbes
VirtualFrog
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we just upgraded to VC2.5 last night and an upgrade that i was expecting to take less than hour took me over 4 to get cleaned up...im not too impressed with the amount of manual intervention it took to get VC up and running this time around. Seems like there were a lot of manual sql permissions, etc that i had to do to get everything to work this time around.

Back to your issue...

I ran into the same thing last night about 1AM after i finally completed our upgrade. I found some post in the forums here that told me to stop the Converter service, then go back and try the VC server service. Voila, it worked. you can then go back and start the Converter service.

i have a ticket open w/ VMWare now, because this is unacceptable to me. everytime our VC server would reboot, it will need manual intervention to get it started. there has to be a fix for it.

but at least for now VC is up and running...worked for me, hope it helps you.

-t

lamothe
Contributor
Contributor
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Thanks for the responses. We resolved the problem.

We store our tnsnames.ora file is on a network drive to simplify maintenance. The problem was that the VMware Virtual Server serivce was running as the Local System account on our server. This account did not have access to the network drive where tnsnames.ora was located. The log files you pointed me to showed, as expected, "TNS could not resolve the connect identifier specified".

To resolve this we created a domain account with access to the tns network drive and made that user an admin on the server. We changed the service to run under that account. We were then able to start the service no problem.

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