The vCenter Inventory Service fails to start or slow to start

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

The vCenter Inventory Service has a startup time limit of 30 minutes, after which it fails to start.

If the issue is on vCenter Server 6.x see: VMware Inventory Service fails to start in vCenter Server 6.x

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x

Resolution

These actions can speed up the vCenter Inventory Service startup or prevent it from timing out:
 

• Increase the Inventory Service timeout limit.

1. Edit the wrapper.conf file located in one of the these locations:
    
   • For the vCenter Server Appliance: Inventory_Service_install_directory/wrapper/conf/wrapper.conf
     By default, the location is /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/inventoryservice/wrapper/conf/wrapper.conf
   • For vCenter installed on Windows: Inventory_Service_install_directory\conf\wrapper.conf
     By default, the location is C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Inventory Service\conf\wrapper.conf.
      
2. Specify the new wrapper.startup.timeout value in seconds by editing these section of the file:

# Service dependencies. Add dependencies as needed starting from 1
wrapper.startup.timeout=1800


For example: To increase the startup timeout time to 90 minutes, change this section of the file to this:

# Service dependencies. Add dependencies as needed starting from 1
wrapper.startup.timeout=5400
 

 

• Improve disk performance.

Increased startup time might result from low available I/O bandwidth and or low available I/O operations per second on the physical disk mapping to the Inventory Service data location.

Monitor physical disk performance and identify and remedy I/O bottlenecks to fix this problem.

• For systems with more than 500 virtual machine snapshots, edit authorization-config.xml as described in the resolution section in Search functionality stops working after upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1a or 1b.

Note: This modification results in a change in the view permissions for virtual machine snapshots on the vSphere Web Client, allowing any logged-in user access to view any snapshot's information. This does not allow any increased view or management access to the virtual machine or allow operations on the snapshot, such as reverting to a snapshot or managing the snapshot, for users who do not have appropriate permissions for that snapshot.