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michaelcprice
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vCenter Storage Monitoring Service Service Initialization failed after upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5

I recently upgraded from vCenter 5.1 to 5.5. After the upgrade I began to get health warnings for the VMware vCenter Storage Monitoring Service that say "Service initialization failed". I have rebooted the vCenter server and restarted the services several times and that has not cleared the issue. When I look in the SMS.LOG file there is no activity in it since the date I did the upgrade (a week or more ago). All prior activity in the SMS.LOG looks to be fine up up until the upgrade occured though. I have found at least a half-dozen KB articles that describe various reasons why this error might occur but they all pertain to older versions of vCenter. Just to be thorough though I reviewed the symptoms in the articles and none of them really seem to be the same as what I am seeing. My one hypothesis is that perhaps the SMS didn't get properly re-installed during the upgrade because I don't see any SMS sub directory in the \Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps directory but I'm not even sure if this directory should exist on a 5.5 installation.

Would appreciate if anyone has any troubleshooting advice for this type error.

Thanks,

Mike

1 Solution

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pratjain
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Change the service account credentials for VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service to the ones being used to start the VMware VirtualCenter Server service and the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices service. By default, the account used it Local System.


Restart the service the change has been made and then check.

    

Regards, PJ If you find this or any other answer useful please mark the answer as correct or helpful.

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16 Replies
pratjain
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Change the service account credentials for VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service to the ones being used to start the VMware VirtualCenter Server service and the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices service. By default, the account used it Local System.


Restart the service the change has been made and then check.

    

Regards, PJ If you find this or any other answer useful please mark the answer as correct or helpful.
michaelcprice
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This appears to have resolved my issue. Thanks.

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JumpyJW
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Solves mine too... thanks !

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pitogo
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woop there it is!!  Thanks.   Did the same thing 5.1 to 5.5.  Had to do the vcdb.properties fix for non-standard port and instance.  But this was the key–service account.

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shartma
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Bazinga!

thx

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jim_best
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Hello,

What if the solution you proposed does not work? I followed your instructions and still getting this annoying "Service initialization failed" error in the Service Health tab. Since SMS doesn't work I can't even verify what is going wrong by checking out the sms.log file (last log in this file is dated back to the day when we performed vCenter upgrade).

Starting/stopping Profile-Driven Storage Service does not throw any errors/exceptions, the service itself seems to be starting fine.

I changed the Local System account to the same domain account that vCenter Server operates on, restarted all services, restarted whole server, still nothing. Where should I start digging?

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goyer
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Hello,

i have the same problem and the change of account didn't resolve this problem for me. Like jim_best, the sms.log is dated back to the day of the upgrade so no error of search...

Have you an idea ?

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Hutoa
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Yes, that worked for me also, thanks to all involved.

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goyer
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I found 2 kb for this problem. One talk about the service account (VMware KB: VMware vCenter Storage Monitoring Service fails with the error: Service initialization fa...)

Another alk about H2 database that may be corrupted (VMware KB: VMware vCenter Server Storage Monitoring Service fails to start ). This second kb indicate that delete the file in sms directory in "C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps" but i don't have sms directory here. May be it is a start of search to my problem.

Have you an idea ?

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six4rm
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Hi,

I'm in the same boat. I've upgraded from 5.0 to 5.5 and the sms.log file hasn't been updated since the night my upgrade. I've tried both steps above, but neither has made any difference.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

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jim_best
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@six4rm @goyer

Check if any of your datastores names contain special characters like $, # or &, correct it and restart the VMware Profile-Driven Storage service. It should fix your problem, it solved mine at least.

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six4rm
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Hi jim_best,

Thanks for the reply.

My datastore names only contain alphanumeric characters and the odd hyphen, that's all. I've been trying all day to raise a support request with VMware but it keeps failing. I've given up going around in circles online.

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goyer
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Hi all,

Thanks for the tips but i always have the problem. My Datastore name contain 1 underscore but remove it didn't solve the problem.

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mkadoura
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thank you.

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madneves
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Thanks this solved my issue. you Star

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itsangiep
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Changing the creds for the service account worked for me!  Thank you! @prateek jain

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