Considering that I installed VC51/VCHB65 nearly 10 times in the last 3 days on virutals and physicals with TOTALLY CLEAN, FRESH AND PRESTINE 2003 and 2008 R2 installs and got the EXACT SAME results every time, it's hard for me to imagine I'm the only one experiencing this issue.
Anyway, after 3 days of pounding my bloddy nuckles agains this issue I found something that fixed it.
I found it on this site http://www.daemonzone.net/
It essentially explains how to more finely tune vc51's services startup by doing the following:
- SingleSignOn Service - add sql server startup dependency to ssotomcat
- Inventory Service - add SSO startup dependcy to vimQueryService
- Virtual Center Server Service - make sure the vpxd service startup dependcies contain the following, in the following order:
- ProtectedStorage
- lanmanworkstation
- MSSQLSERVER
- ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS
- ssotomcat
- vimQueryService
I did this on the Primary and Secondary HB servers and things have never been this stable. Here are the exact instructions from that site:
- Using regedit go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ssotomcat, create a new Multi-String Value called DependOnService and add MSSQLSERVER (or the name of your MSSQL Server instance) as a value data. This ensure that the vCenter SSO service will start after the MSSQL instance.
- For the vCenter Inventory Service go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vimQueryService and add ssotomcat as a service dependence.
- For the vCenter Server itself go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpxd and ensure that the DependOnService key contains the following entries:
- ProtectedStorage
lanmanworkstation
MSSQLSERVER
ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS
ssotomcat
vimQueryService
- ProtectedStorage