Hello all, before I start ranting about my problems over the weekend trying to recover my Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 and Active Directory, I will tell you about a small problem with my vCenter installation.
If (like me) you know about VMWare but a newbie to vCenter you may not know why after you restart your vCenter server why you cannot connect to vCenter with the VSphere client. After some digging around in the VMWare fourms I came across this post:-
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/89855;jsessionid=20C841686151B792D2561F3587950AAC
Which explains the problem as vCenter services trying to start before your SQL server / service instance starts (or in my case SQL Express). So a quick fix would be to go into Services and change the dependency of the service, otherwise follow these instructions as per my screenshot:-
Click start – run, then type in regedit
Click enter
Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesvpxd
Name: DependOnService (REG_MULTI_SZ)
Value:
ProtectedStorage
lanmanworkstation
Check your SQL service instance name within the services.msc console, default and on my server it was the below. then add this into the Reg key, click OK, close regedit and reboot the service
MSSQL$SQLEXP_VIM
A screenshot below shows the relevant information:
