SPS and UpdateManager services not starting

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• vcenter is up and running but 'Update' tabs do not load
• upon looking at the services status from an ssh session we can confirm that both sps and update manager are stopped
  

  service-control --status --all

• /var/log/vmware/vmware-sps/sps.log shows the following error:
  

  NoPermission: Permission to perform this operation was denied

  
  

Environment

7.x

Cause

• Solution users to authenticate these services are missing, are incorrect or do not have permissions 
• The root cause/fix for this error may be one or all of the steps below, so please run through all of them to validate it

Resolution

Missing solution users:

1. To investigate if your solution users are missing please use 'lsdoctor -u' as explained here
2. If the solution users are missing the script will detect it and will recreate them
3. take note of the numbering after the solution users type such as vpxd-XXXXXX
4. restart all services and confirm if the issue is resolved

Missing or duplicate permissions:

1. This error also can happen if there are duplicate permissions for the user Administrator so kindly review it here
2. if the step1 does not show any duplicate entry please follow the next section 

Incorrect solution users:

1. after recreating the solution users (the script always recreate them either they are missing or not) please open the vcenter UI
2. Go to Administration > Global Permissions
3. search for 'vpxd' (you should have one entry for each vcenter in link mode and the numbering should match vpxd-XXXX as per the users recreated before)
   
4. Taking this case as example for 2 vcenters in ELM we can see 2 entries but one does not match with our faulty vcenter
5. change the filter from 'vpxd' to the incorrect node UUID (vpxd-XXXX)
   Note: Take in consideration to only filter with numbers and not the 'vpxd-'
6. the results should now show several solution users for that incorrect node
7. select one by one and remove them
8. Press 'ADD' and search by the correct UUID as seen on step3
9. Add all existing solution users with the correct node UUID and check the box to 'propagate permissions to children'
10. start services with:
    

    service-control --start sps
    service-control --start updatemgr