VMware vCenter Server error 26002. Setup failed to register VMware vCenter Server to VMware vCenter Inventory Service

Last week I had trouble upgrading a customers VMware vCenter server from 5.0.0 build 623860 to 5.1b.

To be sure I had, of course, taken a snapshot of the VM before starting the upgrade, but I thought I would still see if I could fix it since some of my readers might have a physical vCenter (hence no snapshots) or have simply forgotten to make one.

Here is a screenshot of the error:

VMware vCenter Server error 26002. Setup failed to register VMware vCenter Server to VMware vCenter Inventory Service

I looked into the vim-vcs-msi.log log file, but the contents did not provide much help.

After some quick Google searching I stumbled upon the following post on Community forums.
The post contains steps to do BEFORE upgrading your vCenter to avoid SSL certificate issues.

This gave me an idea, perhaps I could replace the SSL certificates the vCenter server was using to connect to the Inventory Service with the certificates from the Inventory Service folder.

#1 Rename C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\SSL to fx C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\SSL-BACKUP
#2 Create new folder C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\SSL
#3 Copy contens of C:\ProgramData\VMware\Infrastructure\Inventory Service\ssl to C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\SSL
#4 Restart vCenter Server service
#5 Start upgrade of vCenter again

Finally the upgrade completed without errors!

As always, if this helped you please leave a comment! 🙂

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