vSphere 4 Web UI Fail – Auto Starting The vSphere 4 Web Service

Today was like Christmas morning. All the waiting was over, and I downloaded the eval of vSphere 4. I can still recall the smell of the warm plastic DVD that came out of the writer, and the joy I felt  holding it in my hands. I popped the disk into an unsuspecting box, and began the install.

After a happily uneventful installation, I browsed to the freshly minted DHCP address the box obtained. After fighting the unsigned SSL nonsense, asked it to log into the Web UI, and I was greeted with:

vSphere4 web ui fail:

“Ok,” I thought, and logged into the console to check the logs. Hostd was reporting:

[2009-05-28 02:51:27.180 F64B4B90 warning ‘Proxysvc Req00006’] Connection to localhost:8308 failed with error N7Vmacore15SystemExceptionE(Connection refused).
[2009-05-28 02:51:46.012 F6432B90 warning ‘Proxysvc Req00007’] Connection to localhost:8308 failed with error N7Vmacore15SystemExceptionE(Connection refused).
[2009-05-28 02:51:47.566 F6432B90 warning ‘Proxysvc Req00008’] Connection to localhost:8308 failed with error N7Vmacore15SystemExceptionE(Connection refused).

“Odd,” was the next thought, “What’s going on here?” Actually, the text was much more graphic, but I’ll leave that to your imagination. I then glanced into the config directory:

[root@localhost ~]# ls -alh /etc/vmware/webAccess/
total 24K
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4.0K May 27 07:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4.0K May 28 02:58 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   97 May 27 07:25 cache.properties -> /usr/lib/vmware/webAccess/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.16/webapps/ui/WEB-INF/classes/cache.properties

So the text here blows, but that symbolic link was bunk and a half. Here, look:

The next step was to find out what was going on with the link, why was it broke? Did it exist elsewhere"?

[root@localhost /]# find . -name cache.properties
./etc/vmware/webAccess/cache.properties

No such luck it seems. Why? Why would vSphere do this to me? Well, because the vmware-webAccess service wasn’t started, in fact it wasn’t even configured to start:

[root@localhost ~]# service vmware-webAccess status
webAccess is stopped

[root@localhost ~]# chkconfig –list vmware-webAccess
vmware-webAccess    0:off    1:off    2:off    3:off    4:off    5:off    6:off

So we fixed it with some chkconfig magic and then started it:

[root@localhost ~]# chkconfig –level 345 vmware-webAccess on

[root@localhost ~]# chkconfig –list vmware-webAccess
vmware-webAccess    0:off    1:off    2:off    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

[root@localhost ~]# service vmware-webAccess start
Starting VMware Virtual Infrastructure Web Access:
   VMware Virtual Infrastructure Web Access                [  OK  ]

[root@localhost ~]# service vmware-webAccess status
webAccess (pid 26420) is running…

After this, it all worked!