vSphere search endless loop even after re-install

[vmsafe]

I rely heavily on the Search in the upper right corner of the vSphere client. I use it every day. All of a sudden yesterday the Search stopped working. I enter some text there hit enter and see Searching...and the spinning dots and it just keeps looping and never returns any result.

I tried a re-install of the client and that made no difference.

Any suggestions?

[Troy_Clavell]

are your rollup jobs running as scheduled? Does you DB have enough disk space? No issue with out of control transaction logs?

[vmsafe]

Other clients work just fine. No issues with transaction logs, rollup jobs, or db size.

[debaillon]

Did you ever find a solution to this problem?  We are running 3 vCenter Servers in linked-mode, all running version 4.0.0, 162856, and have the same search issue.

[admin]

Check out http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1024493 and http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1031144

Maybe they will help you?

[debaillon]

Thanks. I think the client/vCenter version mismatch is the issue. We're running a v4.0 vCenter server with some v4.1 clients.

[DSTAVERT]

The icon you use to launch the vSphere client is actually just a launcher. If it is connecting to a 3.5 installation it will launch the 3.5 client. If it is a 4.0 host or vCenter server it will launch the 4.0 client and so on. If you don't have 4.1 hosts anywhere you will not ever launch the 4.1 client.

[debaillon]

The broken search turned out to be related to having multiple versions of the vSphere client installed.  We installed 4.1 on some machines in an attempt to fix the "error parsing the server <hostname> clients.xml file" error that was caused by .NET sp2 detailed here...

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1549684

VMware has since released 4.0 u1 and u2 updates to the vSphere client which appear to correct the XML error and fix search as well (after we uninstalled all other versions of the client.)

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102261...

I had to login to http://www.vmware.com/support/ and search for "vsphere client 4.0 update 1" which took me to vCenter downloads.  Once I clicked the link for the appropriate version of vCenter, I was allowed to download only the component I needed (the 4.0 client u1 or u2).