The 6.5d target VCSA instance fails to start vAPI service at 66% of stage 2, step 2 in installer.exe wizard from the VCSA .ISO at firstboot and my upgrade fails. Our topology is 2x 6.0u2 external PSCs at different sites in enhanced link mode that are working fine in the environment and appear service healthy and no less than 20% free space on any internal partition. The exact error from the wizard is:
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An error occurred while starting service 'vapi-endpoint'
Failed to start the vAPI Endpoint Service
Failed to configure vAPI Endpoint Service at the firstboot time
Resolution
Please file a bug against VAPI
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It doesn't look like a network problem since the wizard gets through the network verification settings and I've verified that the machine running installer.exe has functional DNS to everything involved, but just to confirm, I've tried:
- using an ephemeral port group instance of our management VLAN on the distributed switch, as installer.exe requests (but not a standard switch yet)
- using straight IP addresses instead of FQDN because I've had other VMware products cause this grief before during setup
- entirely disabling the Windows firewall
- running the installer as a domain admin of the domain our PSC is configured to talk to over LDAP as an identity source (it is not joined to the domain, however)
I opened a support case with VMware a week ago / last Wednesday, but they have been very slow to give in and ask for logs to escalate up to engineering. PLEASE, has anyone else had this issue and what helped get you through the PSC upgrade?
Support told me to look at this, but we don't have any GPO under software restrictions at all so it does not seem relevant:
Windows vCenter Server 6.5 installation fails while configuring the vAPI EndPoint Service
Does anyone know if the installer.exe invokes Java from an internal bundle or if Java must be installed in Windows as a prerequisite?
Thanks for any ideas... at all.
