Today I reinstalled my vCenter server so that I could manage both of my vSphere Hosts centrally, the installation itself went as smoothly as possible but there was one small blip.
When connecting to the vCenter server I discovered that I couldn’t browse to the Hardware Status page but if I connected directly to the host with the vSphere client I had no issues.
A Google search later found that this had been an issue back in 2009 but I hadn’t really found much since, the methods to fix this differed slightly with me probably down to the fact that I had installed vCenter onto a 2008 R2 SP1 installation.
To fix the issue on a 2008 R2 installation do the following.
1. On the vCenter server go to Start – Run – ADSI Edit
2. Select connect to and ensure the following is selected under connection settings
- Connection name - vCenter
- Connection Point – Distinguished Name is selected and name is “dc=virtualcenter, dc=vmware,dc=int”
- Computer - Server name : localhost
- port : 389
- Click ok to connect
4. Once in Adsi Edit browse to
Right click on the CN=VIMWEBSVC and choose Properties.
Scroll Down to vmw-vc-URL
Here we can see that this is populated with a DNS name, we are going to change it to an IP address.
Click OK and exit out from ADSI Edit.
At this stage I then launched Services.MSC and restarted the two following services.
However, when trying to restart the VMware VirtualCenter Server service (which requires a restart of the Webservices service anyway) I had an issue where the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices service wouldn’t restart, at this point a simple reboot resolved the issues.
Once the vCenter server had restarted (and I reconnected back via the vSphere Client) I then went to the Hardware Status Page and was presented with the following screen.
All fixed 
10 GHz Total CPU 
16 GB Total RAM 
8,192 GB Total Disk
1 Host(s)
1 RPs
5 VMs
0 vMotions
(4) 
(1) 
(0)
2 Physical NICs
2 Virtual PGs
Colchester 
Thank you so much. This totally fixed my hardware tab refresh issue and the fact that it now polls hardware statuses in the background every 5 minutes like it’s supposed to! I didn’t find out about 2 RAID drive failures on two seperate servers today until I just happened to manually refresh the hardware tab. Now I should be getting alerted via email the minute a problem occurs instead of doing this once a day.
Many, many thanks.
Glad to be of assistance
Thanks for this advice. It was very usefull.
I want just to add a link to a microsoft knowlege base about ADSI Edit.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc773354(WS.10).aspx
I was unable to launch adsiedit so I had to register adsiedi.dll (regsvr32 adsiedit.dll) first as statuted by the above mentioned kb.
Rado.