VMware vSphere ADAM/LDS issues after an in-place OS upgrade.

I’m not a huge fan of doing in-place OS upgrades, but sometimes its just a necessary evil. Today I upgraded one of our vCenter servers from Server 2003 R2 64-bit to Server 2008 R2, which is a supported upgrade path from Microsoft.

The OS upgrade itself went smoothly, but about 10 minutes after the final reboot vSphere Service Status alerted on these two issues:

• LDAP replication health monitor – Failed to initialize LDAP instance manager
• LDAP backup task monitor – JoinTool initialization error

If you didn’t already know, vCenter relies upon Microsoft ADAM which was renamed Lightweight Directory Service. vCenter uses this as a repository for things like roles, license keys and many other metadata-ish stuff.

I searched around the VMware KB & Google and really didn’t find anything useful. Then I dug through the vCenter Webservices Logs (vws.log), and ran into this:

Action: Local ldap environment verification
Problem: LDAP tools not found in “C:WindowsADAM”

I zeroed in on: Problem: LDAP tools not found in “C:WindowsADAM and compared that directory between a known working vCenter on Server 2008 R2 and this problem child server.

Sure enough 3 files were missing:

• DSACLS.EXE
• LDIFDE.EXE
• REPADMIN.EXE

After synchronizing that directory with the working server, I restarted vCenter Web Services and the errors went away! My assumption would be that during the upgrade those files were nuked as the LDS role was re-applied.

For folks who might not know, here’s a VMware KB article for log file locations: KB1021804

Till next time…