I have been getting few requests lately of vCenter 6.7 Appliance installation fails after the first reboot. It sounds like a common theme mostly in lab environments. Below is one of the quite few similar errors that I have received.
“A problem occurred during setup. Services might not be working as expected – Starting VMware Component Manager ….”
Unfortunately, the error is not very perspective. Checking on the cause of this issue for couple of friends, and it end up being caused by a time difference between their ESXi hosts, and the being deployed vCenter Appliance. While most take care of NTP configuration religiously in production environment, that seems to often being skipped into lab environments. As vCenter 6.7 & higher time sync is becoming more crucial than ever, which in turn can cause your installation to fail. KB56124 is covering this particular issue, and provide more details on what error to expect in the log file in such situation.
In both cases that I have helped my friends with, they have inserted an NTP server to sync the vCenter appliance with but forgot to do the same for their ESXi host. The way to setup NTP on your ESXi host is as follow:
- Login to your host using the vSphere Web Client
- Go to Host => Manage => System => Time & Date
- Hit Edit Settings
- Configure the NTP Server as in the below screenshot & Save
- Start the NTP Service Client on the ESXi host, by going to Actions=>NTP Service => Start
