A consultant working with our Alcatel phone system encountered a weird issue that caused us some problems the other day. When attempting to install an Open Touch Media Server (used for receiving fax, for example), the entire vCenter client environment froze, and a reload of the page resulted in the following error message:
503 Service Unavailable (Failed to connect to endpoint: [N7Vmacore4Http20NamedPipeServiceSpecE:0x0000…] _serverNamespace = / action = Allow _pipeName =/var/run/vmware/vpxd-webserver-pipe)
A lot of searching the web led me nowhere – there were a bunch of solutions, but none of whose symptoms agreed with what I was experiencing; I had not changed IP addresses on the vCenter Appliance, nor had I changed its name, and I did not have an issue with logs reporting conflicting USB device instances.
What I did have, though, was a new OpenTouch server on one of my ESXi hosts, which did not have a network assigned to its network interface, and this, apparently is not a configuration that vCenter was written to take into consideration.
Logging on to the local web client on the specific ESXi host where the machine was running (after identifying that…), and selecting the machine in question, I got a warning message specifying the network problem, and a link to the Action menu. Simply selecting a valid network and saving the machine configuration was enough to allow me to ssh to the vCenter Appliance and start the vmware-vpxd service:
# service-control –start vmware-vpxd
We’ll just have to see how we proceed from here…