Vcenter on Evan Hoffman

vCenter Data Migration tool doesn't restore SQL Express DB - Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 2)

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:44:01 +0000

I’m into my second day on this project. It appears that the backup and restore procedures run to completion but on the target machine the database is empty. This is pretty easy to check; I just went in with SQL Management Studio, looked in VIM_VCDB -> Tables -> dbo.VPX_DATASTORE and did “Open Table.” On the source machine I saw all the datastores in there (as expected). On the target machine, however, the table was empty. I found KB 1024380 describing a failure of the migration tool with a symptom, “Data Migration Tool logs (restore.log) does not indicate any errors, but the database is blank.” The KB says:

vCenter Data Migration tool doesn't restore SQL Express DB - Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 2)

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:44:01 +0000

Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 1)

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:28:12 +0000

When vSphere 4.1 was released earlier this year, I was mildly excited. Our ESX servers are still running 4.0.0 and I had been planning to upgrade to 4.0u1 for a while. When 4.1 came out it seemed to have vindicated my procrastination: now I could just upgrade to 4.1 and take advantage of whatever new features there were (I read something about memory compression… whatever). I assumed the upgrade procedure for vCenter itself would be pretty simple: uninstall 4.0 and install 4.1. Well, it turns out that’s not the case! I sat down one day to create my game plan for the upgrade and right away I learned this was going to be a lot more work than I’d guessed. From VMware’s KB:

vCenter: Error parsing the server "(server IP)" "clients.xml" file

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:18:59 +0000

I got the above error today after running Windows Update on my XP VM a few days ago. A quick search showed that the error is caused by a Microsoft update to the .NET framework. To resolve it, remove update KB980773 (Add/Remove programs, make sure “Show Updates” is checked; KB980773 is under “Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2”). I removed it and was able to log in without problems.

vCenter: Error parsing the server "(server IP)" "clients.xml" file

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:18:59 +0000