A few days ago I received a mail of a former student of mine. They have updated their VMware environment to the latest vSphere 5.5U2 and afterwards Horizon View from 5.2 to 6.0.

From a procedural point of view it has seemed that everything has worked fine. But on a second look he has realized that in the Horizon View Manager dashboard the vCenter was marked red (‘service is not working properly ‘) and pool operations were not working anymore.

From a systematic troubleshooting perspective I recommended him to check that the connectivity between the Connection and Server was doing fine. OSI Layer 1-4 were working well (ports haven’t been changed as well between the VMware versions). For the connectivity check of layer higher than 4 I told him to check the ‘classical-access-logs’ to see a problem with the authentication.

%ProgramData%\VMware\VirtualCenter\vpxd.log
%ProgramData%\VMware\CIS\IMStrace.log

%ProgramData%\VMware\VDM\logs\*.log

and to verify that the service-account has proper vCenter access and the correct permissions set within a role.

And voila –> the service user’s vCenter permission was removed during the upgrade (-> All other permissions were still in place).  Maybe a malfunction during the SSO / AD-LDS upgrade. Unfortuneatly I am not able to have closer look to do a root-cause analysis of it.

Anyway! If you observe similiar issues –> a) Use a systematic approach to verify system-communication or b) check directly the vCenter permissions.