Thursday, November 26, 2009

vCenter Upgrade 2.5 Upgrade 5 Fails and Windows 7/2008R2 Freezing

I downloaded vCenter Server 2.5 upgrade 5 and fought to get it loaded on our server this week.  Every time I launched the wizard I ran into an error once the MSI installer kicked off. I kept getting 25035 and 25055 errors from the installer.  I found one article, http://communities.vmware.com/thread/140517, which finally tipped me in the right direction.  Someone was getting 25095 errors while trying to install the infrastructure client, and it was failing for them, because of a GPO restriction.  When I checked the file properties inside the vCenter 2.5 upgrade 5's folder, I found that all but the autorun program for the upgrade (.exe and .msi files), were all being blocked by the Windows Attachment Manger.  I'm guessing the files are packaged in the zip file blocked, which caused the problem. I went through and unblocked them all and installed the patch without incident. (Outside of accidently selecting purge my existing database... doohhhhhh!!!)

Unblock a Windows .exe or .msi file

I originally was trying to remedy a problem with a Windows Server 2008 R2.  I found out that the VMware video driver is the culprit.  The problem seems to occur on ESX Server 3.5 and 4.0 with Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 virtual machines.  The remedy is to uninstall the VMware SVGA video driver and/or don't install it with the VMware tools. The problem was the video locking up and the system not properly responding. You could RDP into the virtual machine, but it wouldn't reboot or shutdown under it's own power; You had to turn off the VM power and restart it. So far, so good. Hopefully, the SVGA II driver will be updated soon.


Removing SVGA II driver - Device Manager

Removing SVGA II driver - Control Panel

KB from VMware:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1011709

Microsoft Technet Forum:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsserver2008r2general/thread/bc0f3c12-eda7-440d-a228-213a8d0b956c


Happy Turkey Day!

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