vCenter 4.1 Service Status "Cannot access the health service"

[shimmyt]

Hey everyone. We are running vSphere ESXi 4.1 on a mixture of HP hosts, with vCenter 4.1 running in Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise in a virtual machine. We recently updated the SSL certificate on our vcenter server to one from our local CA. Following the vmware documentation everything went just fine. The only thing that seems not to work now is the vCenter Service Status, Licensing Reporting Manager, and the Hardware Status tab brings up a "Communication error with the server". All of the solutions I have found in the communities have to do with DNS resolution not working but DNS resolution is working properly. Also I've seen these two KB posts:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1013632

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1018993

The first one involves just updating to 4.01 but I am running 4.1 so that doesn't apply. The second article says that there is a bug in 4.01 which also doesn't apply. Any help from the community would be greatly appreciated.

[pauljawood]

Hi,

I know this may well have been checked already but is the 'VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices' started. If this service is not running then you will not be able to access those areas.

Exit the VI client and then start the service and log back in to the VI client to make sure the plugins register.

If you found this helpful then please leave some points.

[shimmyt]

Thanks for mentioning that. The Management Webservices service is started.

[pauljawood]

Hi,

If it is running and you are getting the communication error under the plugin window I would suggest the following:

1. Exit the VI client
2. Stop the VC and Webservices
3. Restart the VC (check to see if the Webservices start if not then start this as well)
4. Connect to VI and check again.

I have only seen the communication error when the Webservices cannot be contacted. If the error is still present the old solution to everything could be to restart the VC server and see if that resolves it.

If I can think of any other reasons then I will reply but that is as I said pretty much the only reason I have come across myself.

[shimmyt]

thanks for the reply tried that last night. VC, and the webservices all restarted properly. I think your onto something though. I will do some researching into the webservices logs and see if I can't pull out more info.

[shimmyt]

Just wanted to say I did get this fixed. A few things I had to do though.

1. I changed the password that I used to create the SSL cert to one of our internal default passwords as opposed to testpassword. That is not supported:   

    http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1013472. I had also updated my server.xml file. So I changed that back to testpassword and restarted vcenter service, and

    vcenter webservices and about half of the things that were broken before now fixed.

2. To fix the rest of the broken stuff, (performance reports not working, storage management service not working) took a little more research. Thanks to

    Beovax thread here: http://goo.gl/9oSgb I discovered that you have to use one of the older versions of OpenSSL. In my case .9.8q worked for me. But the

    1.0 versions will not worked. I revoked the certificates I had created before and generated new ones. All seems to be well now. Thanks for everyones

    help!