I just ran into the following issue when I upgraded the customers vCenter Server to 2.5 U4: “”Failed to install the VC agent service” Error Message Appears after VirtualCenter Upgrade”. None of the 3.0.x hosts would connect anymore. Of course the knowledge base provided a simple solution for this known issue. I thought I would document it as well in case I would run into it again. For me just restarting mgmt-vmware and vmware-vpxa was sufficient.
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/4223326
To resolve this issue:
- Disable VMware High Availability (HA). Otherwise, the virtual machines might be forcibly powered down by step 2.
- At the service console, issue the command:
service mgmt-vmware restart- At the service console, runthe command:
service vmware-vpxa restart- Reconnect the virtual machines to VirtualCenter.Attempt to re-enable VMware High Availability (VMware HA) within VirtualCenter. If this doesn’t work, this means that vpxa did not install properly.
- At the service console, run the command:
rpm -qa | grep vpxa- At the service console, run the “rpm -e” command on the rpm file that displayed in the previous command.
rpm -e <rpm from step 6>- This uninstalls the agent from the ESX host. Reconnecting the host to VirtualCenter re-installs the agent.
- Reconnect the virtual machines in the usual manner within VirtualCenter.
- Re-enable VMware HA.
i have never seeing an vc upgrade going good.
always the same.
stupid thing is also that when the microsoft service runs under a sa_ account , vmware changes it into local system.
which means that vc service cannot start.
regards bjornbats
Same issue with ESXi 3.5 U2. But well, you can’t use rpm here. Dell support tried to remove the agent via the uninstall-script but to no avail. We couldn’t vmotion the vms off to other hosts, so we were stuck.
VMWare Support wasn’t able to provide anything more than “We’re still checking your logfiles” for 4 days. Thats when we suspended the VMs, resumed them on another host, rebooted the ESXi host… and were able to reconnect it to the VC.
Scary. Very scary.
that is why I still prefer to go with ESX 3.5 instead of ESXi, troubleshooting wise, the ESX with Linux command available will be more reliable 🙂
The agent would also fail to install in the past sometimes if the vmware-root directory did not exist in /tmp/. When that was discovered, part of my post build script was to always create this directory (VMware used to NOT create this directory by default in an ESX build).
I always choose to do a fresh VC install. i will take the history loss over the headaches any day. whenever i used to have the agent install problem, i used to do a userdel vpxuser and then it would install properly. scary sometimes indeed! 🙁
If use the RPM command to uninstall the agent will it bump off or stop any vertual machines from the Hosts i cam running it on? Let me know please.