Virtual Center crashing on VM power-up

[spchurchill]

Environment: ESX 3.5, VC 2.5

I have a problem with our VC installation - sometimes when I power-up a VM (not a specific one) through the VI3 client the Virtual Center service stops. This happens when using different administration machines with the VI3 client installed.

The service will restart itself after about 5-10mins but you can speed up the process by going onto the VC server and starting the service manually.

Anyone got any ideas?

[weinstein5]

What type of datastore are you using? Also how many VMs/Hosts are you managing? Any errors in the event log of both the VC server and Windows?

[luizhbedin]

This sounds to me as a license issue.

Try to find something in this way....

What is the error logged on windows event viewer on VC server?

[spchurchill]

Hi, thanks for your help both of you.

I am using an HP MSA1500 with SCSI storage on fibre channel. We have about 30 VMs running on 3 hosts (not stressed at all as DRS keeps recommending I shut down a host).

There's nothing in the Windows logs on the VC server for when it stopped but the following event was logged when I restarted the service:

The description for Event ID ( 1000 ) in Source ( VMware VirtualCenter Server ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: Starting VMware VirtualCenter 2.5.0 build-64192.

There is the following error showing in the tasks of the WinXP VM that I was trying to start.

Name: Power On Virtual Machine Target vPC-Utility Initiated by: Status: Error

Related events:

19/5/2008 08:47:11, vPC-Utility on host esx1.domain.com in London is starting

19/5/2008 08:47:10, Changed resource allocation for vPC template

19/8/2008 08:47:09, Task: Power On Virtual Machine

One thing that I notice from this is that it's trying to change the resource allocation on a VM called vPC-template whilst I am trying to start vPC-Utility which is a clone of vPC-template. vPC-template is normally a template but at the time of turning on vPC-Utility it was running as I was applying updates to it. Have the VMs got in a muddle?

Thanks,

Sam

[spchurchill]

Never really got an answer to this but it's not doing it any more so, unless you know what it was, don't worry. Thanks everyone.