VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 installation foibles

Earlier this week I was helping a customer update their VMware ESX environment to v3.5 build 82663 (from v3.0) and the associated VirtualCenter management server to v2.5 build 84782 (from v2.0), after they ran into problems trying to do the work themselves.

Following the successful installation of the "Infrastructure Client" and "VirtualCenter Server" packages, both the "Update Manager" and the "Converter Enterprise for VirtualCenter" plugin packages failed to complete, instead giving errors 25089 and 25086 respectively - "Error 2508x: Unable to logon to VirtualCenter". Knowing the that username and password supplied were correct, I started digging around the log files but there was nothing of interest to be had.

The customer's password was a complex one and happened to include a ";" (semi-colon) character. As the installation process connected to VirtualCenter over the SSL based (broswer) interface, and having prescious little else to go on, I wondered whether this might be the trouble. Sure enough, setting the password to a simple alphanumeric-only string solved the problem and setting the password back to its original form after in the install left everything as it should. I imagine this may prove a good deal trickier in some environments where a minimum password complexity standard is enforced, as I suspect more the just the semi-colon character may cause the same symptoms.

Final testing revealed one more problem. We couldn't manage to get to any of the virtual machine consoles. Network sniffing revealed the VI Client was making a connection to the ESX host on TCP:902 successfully but then trying also to connect on TCP:903 and this was failing. Examining the ESX host itself confirmed it wasn't even listening on TCP:903. This post on the VMware forums provided the answer and adding "vmauthd.server.alwaysProxy=TRUE" to "/etc/vmware/config" restored full service (VI Client now only uses TCP:902).