Installing vCenter Server does not complete with Windows Server 2008
Posted: November 29, 2011 Filed under: VMware, Windows | Tags: 2008, fails, install, server 2008, vcenter, windows 2008, windows server Leave a commentThis is a quickie post to share what I found when installing vCenter Server on a 64-bit Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition virtual machine. This VMware KB article is the error we received.
Apparently, during the installation of vCenter Server, Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services is installed. I hadn’t noticed this before. We had no server roles installed prior to installing vCenter, but after clicking through the error boxes that appeared, we saw that AD LDS, sure enough, appeared to be installed.
To resolve the issue, we simply removed the role and tried the reinstall again. The second time worked a charm. I’m not sure why it hung the first time – I guess I could have checked the logs to see what was going on, but we drove on nonetheless.
BTW – the end of the article mentions that special characters in the password of the account used to connect to the back-end SQL database can also cause this issue. We’ve been using 64-bit SQL Server 2008 SP2 for several customer installs. Each account we’ve used to connect to SQL has had special characters and this is the first time we’ve experienced this problem.
Cheers!