vCenter 5.1.0a: Rollercoasters and you

Hello,
So for the past week(!), I've been trying to get vCenter 5.1.0a installed for a certain environment and it has been an experience!

*NOTE FOR ANYONE NOT INTERESTED IN READING:  I want to give credit to a series of posts by Derek Seaman that I ended up using for reference.  They didn't end up solving (or having anything to do with) the problems experienced below, but they are well written and informative and I will refer to them in the future for a vCenter install.

For full disclosure, I did go in pretty blind.  I figured, I've been doing this for a while and pretty familiar with vcenter, lets just get the ISO going and see how it smells.  Well, when I saw multiple addons/prereq's, I realized it was a new beast.  Bear in mind, the current one is only 5.0 which was still the more traditional install.

At first, I tried to upgrade the current vCenter (running as a VM) and that blew up for some reason that I don't recall.  When I looked at the programs list though, there was a bunch of older version software (thanks for keeping 4.0, 4.1, 5.0 versions of the client installed) and honestly, that VM always felt a bit sluggish and the vcenter service would commonly not start.  So, I decided to move it to a different datastore and shut it down.

Before shutting it down, I deployed a new 2008 R2 vm from my template which I've used on many other machines. I took a snapshot of the vm at each stage while installing and was very methodical on installing the 3 different, check...4 different aspects to a modern vCenter install.

1. Single Sign-On
2. Inventory Service
3. vCenter
4. Web Client (supposedly optional, but required for 5.1 (and beyond) features...)
1. Check out my other post on this subject

Moving on, after installing the first 2 without a hitch, vCenter would NOT install.  I kept getting this...

and then this...

 

So I when hitting up Giggle for the problem, I found a link saying to give the Network Service permissions on the C:\ drive and that would fix it. Admittedly, this did reference older 4.0 or 4.1 installs, but was my exact error # 28038.  Now, I don't know if you know this, but it is not trivial to modify the permissions on C:\Program Files, c:\Program Files (x86) or c:\Windows in 2008 R2...meaning it won't let you.  Specifically Administrators has special permissions set and "Change Permission" is not one of them; obviously neither is Full Control.  Based on that and considering the web wasn't blowing up about 5.1 on 2008 R2, I theorized this wasn't my answer.

The other suggestions were around "making sure its not a domain controller" and "remove the ADAM or AD LDS role" which neither was installed of course.  I kept seeing references to IPv6 for name resolution, but I've used DNS once or twice in my time, so that wasn't the problem (yes I did triple check all resolution directions just to make sure).  IPv4 worked fine, but so did IPv6; if you just ping the name on a 2008R2 server, often you will get a reply from the IPv6 addreess.

Another thing was that my template was fully patched as of 6/10/2012 or something, but in the Programs list, it had Visual 2008 or 2005 redistributable patches as well as Silverlight.  I couldn't imagine how any of that was screwing this, but I uninstalled them anyway, but that didn't fix the install.

So...I was stumped and it was 2am.  I had 2 choices...completely registry-disable IPv6 and/or completely rebuild.  I of course was tired of screwing around and rebuilt.  Again very methodical...snapshots at each stage.  I didn't even patch the server...just install os, install vmware tools, configure IP, add to domain, and then start vcenter install. 

This time I chose the simple install considering I was doing just that.  Guess what...worked no problem including the web client install (which previoulsy had not worked due to some other variable I can't remember)! I suspect that either a patch was getting in the way or one of the pre-setup bits I had done on the template had somehow screwed it up.

So, sometimes punting really is the best and only choice.

Go Pats!

Again, for anyone looking for a very descriptive walkthrough of a 5.1 vCenter install, please reference Derek Seaman's 796000 step process to installing vCenter 5.1.0a! (its really only 13).