This week I’ve been upgrading vCenter in a couple of our labs and came across this issue during and after the upgrade of vCenter from 5.5 Update 2 to 5.5 Update 3a or 3b. During the upgrade of the vCenter the error below is thrown.

vcenter_55u3_phonehome_1

It’s an easy one to ignore as it only relates to the Phone Home Service…which to be honest I didn’t think would or was important at the time. When you click ok the installed finished as being successful, however the vCenter Service is not brought up automatically and when you go to start the service you get the following error from the services manager.

vcenter_55u3_phonehome_2

Not sure why the Googling for this particular error wasn’t as straight forward to search against but if you search to Error 1053 or Error 1053 + VMware you get referenced to some generic forum issues and this VMware KB which is a red herring in relation to this error. With that I went back to search against the Phone Home Warning 32014 and got a hit against this VMware KB which contains the exact error and reference to the deployPkg.dll that you would see in the Windows Application Event Logs when you try to start the vCenter Service.
vcenter_55u3_phonehome_3

The KB title is a little misleading in that it states

Updating vCenter Server 5.5 to Update 3 fails with the error: Warning 32014

However the fix is the right fix and after working through the work around in the KB the upgrades went through without issue and vCenter was at 5.5 Update 3b.

References:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2134141

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2069296