Recently during an upgrade of a an instance of a vCenter Server System to 5.5 Update 3a the installation returned an error with the following message:
Warning 32014. A utility for phone home data collector couldn’t be executed successfully Please see its log file (with name PhoneHome) and vminst.log in system temporary folder for more details.
Upon restarting the ‘VMware VirtualCenter Server’ service the following error message is returned:
Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.”
This is a known issue affecting vCenter 5.5 where the installer failed to update the ‘deployPkg.dll’ file during the upgrade process, to which currently there is no resolution.
To workaround the issue we have two options. Firstly, we can rollback the instance of the vCenter Server System prior to the upgrade and remove the file from patch cache which by default is located at ‘C:\Windows\Installer\$PatchCache$\Managed\05550F1E83248734780F0115742A159D\5.5.0’ and perform the upgrade.
Alternatively, you can perform the following to provide resolution to the issue.
1) Browse to ‘C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\’ and remove the file ‘deployPkg.dll’.
2) Download the file ‘2134141_deployPkg.zip‘ from the official VMware site and extract to the location ‘C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\’.
3) Start both the ‘VMware VirtualCenter Server Service’ and ‘VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices’ services.
4) Uninstall the Profile-Driven Storage service by running the following command with elevated privelages.
msiexec.exe /x {7BC9E9D9-3DF6-4040-B4A1-B6A3A8AE75BA} SKIPVCCHECK=1 SUPPRESS_CONFIRM_UNINSTALL="1" /qr
5) Install the vCenter Server 5.5 Update 3a version of the Profile-Driven Storage by running the following command with elevated privelages. In the below example, I am using ‘vcenter.dean.local’ as the FQDN of my vCenter Server System and the installation media is mounted on D:\.
msiexec.exe /L*V "%temp%\sps_vminst.log" /I "D:\vCenter-Server\Profile-Driven Storage\VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage.msi" INSTALLDIR="C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\" COMPUTER_FQDN=vcenter.dean.local TOMCAT_MAX_MEMORY_OPTION="S" VC_KEYSTORE_TYPE=PKCS12 VC_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD=testpassword VC_SSL_DIR="C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\SSL\" VC_SPS_EXTENSION_DIR="C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\extensions\com.vmware.vim.sps\" IS_URL="https://vcenter.domain.local:10443" ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT=1 SKIPVCCHECK=1 /qr
Now confirm that all your services are running and you are able to access the vCenter Server System.
As this is a known issue, you can prevent the symptom of this prior to performing an upgrade by removing the file from the patch cache prior to running your vCenter Server System upgrade.
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