Vcenter 4.1 Crash with Backup V5, Monitor, Reporter

[leoleo70]

Hello everyone,
I have a server 2008 X64 4GB ram, Quadcore.
I installed vCenter 4.1, V5 Veeam Backup, Veeam Monitor 5 and everything works.
As soon as I installed Veeam Reporter 4, the server has become unstable and vCenter has stopped working.
I had to remove Veeam Reporter 4, then reinstall vCenter.
In this way all the products mentioned except Reporter 4 work without problems.
Are you aware of any problem related to the coexistence of these products?
Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Leonardo,

I haven't heard about this issue before, could this be connected to both IIS/SSRS and Tomcat installed on the same VM? Could you please describe in details how exactly has you vCenter Server stopped working?

Thanks!

[leoleo70]

Hello Vitaliy, thanks for the quick response
After installing the Reporter, the service vCenter stops working, even after a system reboot the service does not restart vCenter.
In the management of events I just get an error saying "unable to start the service, cause unknown"
Thanks

Sincerely

[Vitaliy S.]

Leo,

I've just finished playing with my lab, so I wanted to update you on my findings.

Actually this is not an issue, but an expected behaviour for IIS and Tomcat caused by cross-port usage conflicts - IIS procces takes the port 80 before the VirtualCenter Server service does. That is why the VirtualCenter Server service can not start.

As soon as I've disabled/stopped all IIS services (IIS Admin Service) my VMware Virtual Center Server service was up and running again. I continued googling for some known ways of resolving this...so here you are, should help:

1st way:
1. Set both services Startup Type to Manual
2. Start VMware Virtual Center Server service first and then IIS Admin Service
This workaround would work unless you reboot vCenter Server machine, in this case you should repeat the steps when system boots.

2nd one (seems to be a better choice):
You can change the default port (80) in IIS, so that both web servers are using different ports.
Here is the corresponding KB for that: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/149605

Hope it helps!

Thanks,
Vitaliy

[leoleo70]

Hello Vitaliy,
Unfortunately, even making the change you indicated the problem is resolved.
I also verified that the system becomes unstable not only immediately after you install IIS, but it gets worse after you install SQL Express 2008 with SRSS.
Even services Veeam Backup & Restore does not start, the only thing I can do and remove SQL2008 and IIS, and then reinstall Veeam Backup.
Are you sure Veeam report can be on the same machine and vCenter Veeam Monitor?
Thanks.

Merry Christmas

[Vitaliy S.]

Leo,

Well...my installation of Reporter is running now on the same server and I haven't noticed anything that could point to vCenter Server feeling not good.

As far as I know vCenter Server installs SQL 2005 by default, so could this issue be connected to lack of resources due to 2 SQL Servers/ SSRS/ backup/ monitor jobs running on the same server? What is the size of your infrastructure? Have you seen anything that might shed some light on this behaviour in vCenter Server log files?

On top of that, even though every product is compatible with vCenter Server installation running on the same machine, I wouldn't recommend messing up vCenter Server VM which is mission critical with other applications.

Thanks and Merry Christmas!

[gustavor38]

Same question.
Same problem.
Is there any solution to this or must i uninstall everything, install an sql2008 and begin the installation of all products on that instance?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Gustavo,

Have you checked out the solution I've posted above? Does it work for you?

Anyway, if best practices are concerned I would definitely use separate SQL Server to host Veeam products databases. Thanks!

[gustavor38]

Yes, it is running in other ports, i found that solution yesterday, after reinstall every program again. Our infraestructure is little and one virtual machine for all the adminstration and backup products is ideal. Really, during evaluation period everything was ok in 2008x64 VM but now in production with 2003x64 the problem arise. I don´t want to go back because in this scenary i get a boost performance in the backup part. I will live without reporter if i must to put it in other VM.....
We have the definitive license from yesterday so i don´t know how to contact support yet.
Yesterday during the first setup i got everything installed (after uninstall all workstation packages from sql2005) but after that, reporter had all the buttons gray
Perhaps i am a noobie with this product.
Thanks for your answer.

[Vitaliy S.]

Our infraestructure is little and one virtual machine for all the adminstration and backup products is ideal.

I do understand you, but could you please tell me if you're planning to backup vCenter Server VM? Provided that you have installed backup console on the same machine, the only way to do that would be to backup it without "application-aware image processing".

As to our support contacts, then everything is available on the website: http://www.veeam.com/support.html

[gustavor38]

Yes, i had plan it. I didn´t think about any problem..... my error.
My structure is 3 esxi and vcenter, reporter, backup and monitor in one vm. We are going to backup to a Synology backup containing a nfs datastore visible from esxi´s, after that i pretend to sync it through wan to an remote server with deltacopy (rsync), i don´t know now if its better use incremental or reversed. I am going to install sql2008express with advanced services first and after that the products pointing to that instance. Is there any paper about it? Order of installation, warnings, etc.... Good practices to plan backup and disaster recovery in a structure like this one?
Sorry about my poor english, you can see i am not english native. I hope you understand me.
Thank you in advance.

[Vitaliy S.]

Your setup is pretty common among our customers, so I would recommend you to take a look at the sticky backup F.A.Q. topic. In addition to this please do search for existing discussions related to best practices for the configuration like yours.

[bdet]

[merged]

Hi I was wondering if anyone has run into the similar issue detailed below..

I have vcenter 5 installed on a management server running fine.
Then i went to install veeam one free edition 4.02 reporter , it then goes off and downloads SQL 2008 ssrs and installs ok.
Once its installed I reboot the server and I loose the vcenter and veeam reporter fails to load aswell.

Now for some clarification I know Veeam one uses IIS.

I have made the World wide web service "w3svc" a dependency of vcenter, this is for a smtp server requirement on the same server which works fine without (veeam one installed.) without the dependency vcenter fails to start.

I'm wondering if there is a known issue with veeam one co existing with vcenter 5.

furthermore I have in the past successfully installed in co-existence veeam reporter and vcenter 4.1 for another client.

thanks in advance.

[Vitaliy S.]

I guess there might be some issues in Tomcat and IIS co-existence. Please have a look at two workarounds mentioned above, if it doesn't help, I guess the only way would be to use different servers for vCenter Server and Veeam ONE Reporter.

[QuestIT]

I thought it might be worth chipping in with some more information on this topic as I have encountered the same issue myself this weekend after installing the Veeam ONE Monitoring application for VMware (v6.0) onto an existing VMware vCenter Server 5.0 installation. All seemed fine with the install until the server needed to be restarted, at which point the VMware VirtualCenter Server refused to start. After looking through the log files I found this KB article http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=1003926 and quickly latched onto the possibility that another application was using the required vCenter ports, since the installation of Veeam ONE was the only recent change to the infrastructure. Veeam ONE installs and uses IIS for the creation of two Sites (VeeamBusinessView and VeeamReporter) and this also results in the creation of a Default Web Site within IIS running on port 80. For me, the answer was to simply stop the Default Web Site and set the Start Automatically status within Advanced Settings to False. vCenter and Veeam ONE now happily co-exist on the same server without any contention and all services start promptly whenever the server is restarted for maintenance cycles.