I recently had an issue with a vSphere Environment that is running with a Windows vCenter 6.5. Basically everything worked well since some days ago when for some reason the vCenter’s services started giving some issue, I tried to restart the Windows Machine and all the vCenter services with (service-control –stop –all) but at the same point these services failed to start:
- vPostgres
- EAM
- vSphere-ui
- vSphere-Client
and if I tried to start manually one of this services I just get this:
C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\bin>service-control –start vPostgres
Perform start operation. vmon_profile=None, svc_names=[‘vPostgres’], include_coreossvcs=False, include_leafossvcs=False
2020-06-26T14:08:26.664Z Service vmware-vpostgres state STOPPED
Error executing start on service vmware-vpostgres. Details {
“resolution”: null,
“detail”: [
{
“args”: [
“vmware-vpostgres”
],
“id”: “install.ciscommon.service.failstart”,
“localized”: “An error occurred while starting service ‘vmware-vpostgres'”,
“translatable”: “An error occurred while starting service ‘%(0)s'”
}
],
“componentKey”: null,
“problemId”: null
}
Service-control failed. Error {
“resolution”: null,
“detail”: [
{
“args”: [
“vmware-vpostgres”
],
“id”: “install.ciscommon.service.failstart”,
“localized”: “An error occurred while starting service ‘vmware-vpostgres'”,
“translatable”: “An error occurred while starting service ‘%(0)s'”
}
],
“componentKey”: null,
“problemId”: null
}
So not so much readable that give me the idea of what is going on, but there is always a log file that could help you, to at least solve some doubts, and in this case is the “vmon.log” file.
You can find it on “C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs\”
Withing I started a little search and at the end I found this error:
Failed to Logon as vapiEndpoint user. Error: The user name or password is incorrect
Failed to Logon as vPostgres user. Error: The user name or password is incorrect
Failed to Logon as vSphere-ui user. Error: The user name or password is incorrect
Failed to Logon as vSphere-Client user. Error: The user name or password is incorrect
So this directly points me to the local users created by the vCenter in Windows, so I performed the following steps:
- Start->Run-> compmgmt.msc-> Local Users and Groups-> Users
- Right-click on the service-user that we see the error for and click on Properties
- Make sure that the checkbox stating “Account is locked” and “Change the password at next logon” is not checked.
- After verifying this, right-click the service and click set password.
- Set a complex password and exit for the window.
- Go to the command prompt and navigate to – C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\vmon
- Enter the command – vmon -p “service-name”
- Enter the password that we just set in the local users and click enter.
- Once the above is done for all the services, start the services.
Then I tried to start the failed services and everything come back working fine.
I hope this could be helpful
