vCenter Will Not Start! – vCenter Services Startup Order

This came up on Twitter Sunday, and having happened upon it in the past, I thought I’d share the solution that Ed Haletky (Blue Gears) and I came to. Basically it boils down to the service start order for the vCenter and related services. Specifically the order should be:

1. SQL (MS SQL, Oracle, etc)
2. ADAM (only when using linked mode)
3. vCenter Server
4. vCenter Server Update Manager

In our case the problem service was vCenter Server Update Manager. To correct it, follow this Microsoft KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/193888 to set the service dependency. Hope this was helpful.