VMware vCenter ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS Warning

We migrated/updated our vCenter server from 4.0 with Windows 2003 Server (32bit) on a physical box to 4.1 on a VM running Windows 2008 R2 this week and so far everything has been running smooth and without issues. I did notice that the vCheck script was reporting some warnings in the vCenter log that I had not seen before the migration.

Here is the the warning message:

Active Directory Web Services encountered an error while reading the settings for the specified Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services instance. Active Directory Web Services will retry this operation periodically. In the mean time, this instance will be ignored. Instance name: ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS

This message was being repeated once every minute.

After a bit of research I found a post in the VMware Community which lead me to the fix that is here.

The registry value for \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS\Parameters\Port SSL was set to type REG_SZ and the data for the value was empty. I deleted the Port SSL value, re-added the value as a REG_DWORD with the data set to a decimal value of 636, restarted the VMwareVCMSDS service, and all is well.

Thanks to TheSaffaGeek for this fix.

Migration from vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 – One Geeks Journey…

When we first deployed VMware back in early 2008 vCenter was not yet supported running as a VM (at least I do not think it was). Since we were new to the technology as a whole I don’t think I would have run vCenter as a VM until we were able prove the stability of it in our production environment. Over the past few years I think VMware has proven itself as being robust and impressively stable so much so that we have virtualized every thing that is not nailed down tied to specific hardware – Exchange, Microsoft SQL, AD, web servers, application servers, etc. Since we need/want to upgrade to vCenter 4.1, it also seems like as good a time as any to go ahead and run vCenter as a guest VM.

Currently our vCenter is on a separate physical box running Windows 2003 with 4 GB RAM and a single 2.66 Ghz dual core processor. The vCenter database is on Microsoft SQL 2005 also running on the same physical box. The hardware we have in place would support running vCenter 4.1 but since 4.1 requires a 64 bit OS, and ours is currently running on 32bit, I am going to upgrade/migrate vCenter to a new guest VM running Windows 2008 R2 64. I am also going move the vCenter database to the new VM (I know it is not necessarily best practice to run the DB on the same box as vCenter but my environment is small and it should work out ok – if not I will move the database to another server at a later date) which is running Microsoft SQL 2005 x64.

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VMware Resolution Paths

These are very handy when trying to troubleshoot VM/vCenter/ESX issues. Just identify the path for the issue and read the KBs.

http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/2009/05/resolution-paths-published.html
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Many common tech support issues in VMware products can be solved using what we call Resolution Paths. Resolution Paths are collections of modular steps that can be used to solve tech support issues.

These can be very handy and can save you having to make that call into Tech Support. Click the links below. There’s one for each potential problem area.
http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/2009/05/resolution-paths-published.html