Failed to install the VirtualCenter Agent Service

A number of customers have been reporting the message: “Failed to install the VirtualCenter Agent Service“, when trying to connect an ESX host to virtual center, often after upgrading to ESX 3.0.2 and VC 2.0.2. In all the cases I have come across these reason seems to be that /tmp/vmware-root does not exist. This directory has to exist for the agent install process. To remedy this you can-

  1. Login to ESX Server via ssh client as root user
  2. cd /tmp
  3. mkdir vmware-root
  4. Try re-connecting the host to Virtual Center

Apparently there is a cron job that is removing this directory whenever it runs.Here is another method:

  1. Disable HA. Otherwise, the virtual machines might be forcibly powered down by step 2.
  2. At the service console, issue
    service mgmt-vmware restart
  3. At the service console, issue
    service vmware-vpxa restart
  4. Reconnect the virtual machines to VirtualCenter.
  5. Attempt to re-enable HA within VirtualCenter. If this doesn’t work, this means that vpxa did not install properly.
  6. At the service console, issue
    rpm -qa | grep vpxa
  7. At the service console, issue “rpm -e” on the rpm file that displayed in the previous command.
    rpm -e <rpm from step 6>
  8. Reconnect the virtual machines in the usual manner within VirtualCenter.
  9. Re-enable HA.
Related posts:
Which ESX log file
ESX Disconnected after Upgrading to VirtualCenter 2.0.1
How To Configure Networking from the Service Console Command Line
Network copy failed for file nvram
Failed to initialize not well-formed invalid token
VMware, VMware ESX, Virtual Center VMwarewolf October 1st. 2007, 7:08pm
Bookmark and Share

10 Responses to “Failed to install the VirtualCenter Agent Service”

  1. John Howell Says:
    January 22nd, 2009 at 10:57 pm

    Perfect. Solved the problem for me. Upgrading existing ESX 3.01 servers after upgrading Virtual Centre to 2.5 U3

  2. Hub Lempers Says:
    March 11th, 2009 at 8:32 am

    Perfect also. It solved my problem too. I couldn’t connect tot esx 3.5 servers after upgrading Virtual Centre to 2.5

  3. Wayne Says:
    April 24th, 2009 at 4:05 am

    Thanks that worked perfectly

  4. Andy B Says:
    June 27th, 2009 at 6:17 am

    Excellent! The service restarts were required but it did the trick. Thanks

  5. Nigel Goldsmith Says:
    August 11th, 2009 at 8:42 am

    Yes – worked for me too ! Thanks

  6. Brandon Nix Says:
    October 17th, 2009 at 10:57 pm

    Thanks so much! I upgraded my VI server from 2.5 to 4.0 and one of 2 servers did not connect, and this solved the problem.

  7. BGood Says:
    December 29th, 2009 at 1:51 pm

    Yes – worked perfectly for me. Was able to rejoin my ESX v3.01 server to the Data Center. The other servers are all ESX v3.5 (which we thought was causing the issue)

    Thanks!!!

  8. jam Says:
    January 7th, 2010 at 7:40 pm

    What is HA please?

  9. VMwarewolf Says:
    January 7th, 2010 at 8:00 pm

    HA is the short form of VMware High Availability.

  10. Jam Says:
    January 8th, 2010 at 4:10 am

    Thanks.

Leave a Reply