With xCAT I used the imagex capabilities to clone a machine (virtual machine) with vCenter on it and now I’m installing that captured image to another virtual machine. One reason I do it this way as opposed to creating a VM Template is that now I’m able to deploy to physical and virtual servers. In addition I can deploy to KVM VMs and VMware VMs.
Anyway, when I restarted the cloned disk, I couldn’t start vCenter Server on it. This is something that I assume happens with all windows images that you run sysprep on regardless or not whether its xCAT induced.
There were a lot of error messages as I trolled through the logs and I searched on all of them:
“Windows could not start the VMware VirtualCenter Server on Local Computer. For more information, review the System Event Log.”
“the system cannot find the path specified. c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\master.mdf” (odd to me, since the file did actually exist!)
“could not start the SQL Server (SQLEXP_VIM) on Local Computer”
I tried all these google terms with little success:
“Virtual Center will not start after reboot”
Finally, I found this post: that finally made sense to me, so I gave it a shot. Here’s exactly what needs to be done:
Step 1
Log into Windows Server 2008 machine and go to ‘Services’
Step 2
Right click on ‘SQL Server (SQLEXP_VIM)’ and click on Properties
Step 3
Under ‘Log On’ check the Local System account and also check ‘Allow service to interact with desktop’
Step 4
Start the ‘SQL Server (SQLEXP_VIM)’ service. It should start up without errors.
Step 5
Do the same procedure (Steps 2-4) to the ‘VMware VirtualCenter Server’ service. This should now start up and you should be able to connect to Virtual Center.
Well, that wasted about 4 hours of my time, but its nice to have a happy ending.
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