Failed to install the VirtualCenter Agent Service

VMware, VMware ESX, Virtual Center October 1st. 2007, 7:08pm

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.
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  2. ESX Disconnected after Upgrading to VirtualCenter 2.0.1ESX Server 3
  3. Network copy failed for file nvram VMotion mig
  4. Failed to initialize not well-formed invalid tokenA few Virtua
  5. Which ESX log fileQuite a few
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4 Responses to “Failed to install the VirtualCenter Agent Service”

  1. John Howell Says:

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

  2. Hub Lempers Says:

    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:

    Thanks that worked perfectly

  4. Andy B Says:

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

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