Today, I installed another VMware vCenter server. This was not an unusual occurrence for me, as more and more companies are implementing server virtualization. But, today was unusual—the installation failed with the obscure error message of “Installation of VMware vCenter Server failed. Install VMware vCenter Server separately by using individual installer rather than WMware vCenter Simple Install.”
Rebooting the server and retrying gave me the exact same results. I suppose it’s just human craziness that makes us think doing the same steps will give different results. After hunting around a bit on the 2008R2 server which I had not build from scratch, I discovered that Microsoft UAC was enabled—UAC stands for Microsoft’s User Account Control.
Hmmm. Was this related to my failure to install?
Turns out that these steps worked: disabling UAC, rebooting, uninstalling two partially installed components, and then starting the Simple Install again.
Here are the details:
- Uninstall UAC:
- Open Control Panel | User Accounts
- Click the “Change User Account Controls Settings” link and move the scroll bar
down to the bottom (never notify)
(Note: although in 2008 UAC is disabled via the “User Accounts” link, in Server
2008R2 its disabled via the “Change User Account Control Settings” link) - Reboot the server to make the changes take effect
- Uninstall the partially installed components of vCenter:
- Run the VMware vCenter installer autorun executable
- Click “VMware vCenter Single Sign On” and click the Remove button
- Click “VMware vCenter Inventory Service” and click the Remove button
- At this point, I rebooted, although I don’t know if this was absolutely essential
- Install VMware vCenter:
- Run the VMware vCenter installer autorun executable
- Select VMware vCenter Simple Install
- Follow the prompts….
This resolved my problem, as vCenter installed without errors in step 3. Note that I confirmed when it asked me whether it should overwrite the existing database and replace it with a blank database. I was using the default SQLExpress database, although I expect the same errors (and resolution) apply to Oracle and SQL Server and DB2 installations of vCenter. I was using VMware 5.1, but this probably also applies to VMware 5.0.