Strange problem: VMware Inventory Service cannot start due to Microsoft Update (July 2016)

In one datacenter of my company, there was a strange problem last month of VMware vSphere.

Here is our structure:
SqlServer instance for vSphere is installed dedicated on cluster server. SqlServer version is 2012 Enterprise and Windows is 2012R2 Standard
vCenter is installed on another server.

After we applied July patches from Microsoft and restart the vCenter server, nearly all services from VMware cannot start. In event viewer, one event said:

The VMware Inventory Service service terminated with the following service-specific error:
Incorrect function.

As the request from VMware support, I uninstalled all updates related and reboot but it won’t help. I thought there may be some error related to the database connection. I ran the connection test from ODBC setup window, test finished succeeded. So I collected and submitted the log file generated from vCenter server command line. You know it’s really huge.

2 weeks later, I got an email from the high level engineers of VMware. By digging the log, they found that the vCenter cannot connect to SqlServer and the tcp service port is specified. At that moment, thanks to documentation I wrote :), I found that tcp service port is different than it should be. When I checked the SqlServer, I found the reason really weird: the TCP port of this instances is modified, automatically and silently. Due to I really used vSphere client just before upgrading Windows, I’m quite sure this issue is related to at least one of the patch which applied on the database cluster, launched by Microsoft in July 2016. And after a search, there is another instance of SqlServer which has the port changed. Due to the port changed and our firewall policy is set based tcp port, the client, vCenter in this issue, cannot connect to this SqlServer instance. After the port setting changed back and instance restarted, vCenter is back to normal.

Don’t ask me why ODBC test passed without any problem. If you know the answer, I’m listening as well.

3 thoughts on “Strange problem: VMware Inventory Service cannot start due to Microsoft Update (July 2016)

  1. Could you please help me how to check the sql service port details, is it on vcenter server or sql server

    1. To check it, open SqlServer Configuration Manager on the server which has SqlServer installed. User manual can be found at Microsoft.

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