Sunday, October 07, 2012

Adding ESXi 5.1 to "5.1 vCenter Appliance" fail

Finally I found time to install vSphere 5.1 in my home lab. I have 5.0 environment running so I've bought another old DELL PE 2950 on czech "ebay like" system Aukro (www.aukro.cz) for just 6.500 CZK (approx. 330 USD) to leave my current lab untouched and try 5.1.

So, I upgraded BIOS and DRAC to latest firmwares and installed DELL version of ESXi 5.1 (embedded) on my DELL PE 2950. Then I installed vCenter appliance (OVF) on top of this new ESX.

I was able to add my old ESX5.0 to this new vCenter but not the new one.

WHAT'S WRONG???

Troubleshooting process ...

In vCenter event log I can see message: "A general system error occurred: Timed waiting for vpxa to start".

In /var/log/vpxa.log ...

2012-10-07T08:33:29.941Z [FFFE1B90 error 'SoapAdapter'] Unsupported namespace "urn:vpxa3" in content of SOAP body
-->
--> while parsing SOAP body
--> at line 9, column 0
-->
--> while parsing SOAP envelope
--> at line 2, column 0
-->
--> while parsing HTTP request before method was determined
--> at line 1, column 0

So, what  versions am I running?


ESXi 5.1.0 (799733)
vCenter Appliance 5.0.0 (755629)


Oooops ... I believed I installed vCenter 5.1 because in my local install archive it is stored as
VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.1.0.5100-799730_OVF10


So the cause is clear ... bad installation image management cost me one hour of troubleshooting :-(





1 comment:

Chad Markley said...

Dude! I spent about 1:30 before I found your post. I hadn't realized when one of my guys said he installed 5 Update 1 he really meant he had installed 5.1. I was using the wrong version of vCenter.

But, your post saved me another hour of troubleshooting! Thanks :)

Chad