Thursday, February 16, 2012

ERROR: com.vmware.converter - Unable to retrieve health data from https://...

Some minor fall-out from the vCenter 5 upgrade...

The vCenter Service Status component displayed an alert for "com.vmware.converter".  The interesting thing is, this plugin is no longer available in vCenter 5!  I did uninstall Converter before the upgrade so I'm not sure why this ended up there, however the following KB does fix the problem.  Note that I did not have to stop the vCenter Server service and I only had to run ADSI Edit on the vCenter instance at my recovery site.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2006132

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

vSphere 5 Upgrade: vCenter and vUpdate Manager

Let me say upfront that had I tested the upgrade against clones of the productions VMs, I would have found these problems ahead of time (note to self for future upgrades!).

I followed the steps published in Its Time: vSphere 5 Upgrade so the first component to get upgraded was the vCenter instance at the recovery site.  This completed successfully - no errors - so far so good.

Next up, vCenter upgrade at the protected site.  The database upgrade step failed(!).  The installer gave a fairly generic error: "database upgrade failed. See the log at...".  The log only mentioned: "failed to execute dbuhelper.exe: an error occurred".

A quick Google search finds the log error posted in a VMware Communities post (TGfVC! - thank goodness for VMware Communities!).  The resolution: set the log file growth to unrestricted.  Sure enough, my log file was set to restricted so I changed it, re-ran the install and viola, success!

That evening, I reconfigured the vCenter Linked Mode feature but they never seemed to reconnect.  By time I came in to work the next morning, it had started working.  I must not have been patient enough(?), not sure but it has worked fine since.

Finally (for this step), vUpdate Manager upgrade.  This went smoothly just as it did in the lab.  Now that its working, I can start upgrading the ESXi hosts.



ERROR: Call "ServiceDirectory.QueryServiceEndpointList" for object "ServiceDirectory" on vCenter Server

Not sure what causes this error.  Google search returned very few hits.  The only solutions proposed:

  • Disable Routing and Remote Access service.
  • Restart vCenter Server service.


The Routing and Remote Access service was already disabled so I just restarted the vCenter Server service and the error went away.

I'll update this post if a root cause ever presents itself.