A friend of mine who is still a student has been building his own VMware lab environment for some time now. Yesterday he contacted me that he couldn’t get the “VMware VirtualCenter Server service” to start anymore.
The log showed: EventID 7021 “The VMware VirtualCenter Server service terminated with service-specific error 2 (0×2).”
A quick google search however showed that many things could be causing this error. Because it was a lab environment, I wanted to upgrade the virtual center to the latest version. Before doing so, I took a look at the VMware blog post covering the latest update 5.1.0B. In the readme it said:
“SSO service dependency on MS SQL
When SSO is installed with local Microsoft SQL Server, the services must start in a specific order.
SSO must start after SQL Server starts. If SSO starts before SQL Server starts, restart the SSO
server after SQL server starts.”
Doing so resolved the issue. To prevent the issue from re-occurring, I made the SSO service dependent on the SQL service.
I don’t understand why this is not part of the automated installation process though 😦
blog.bjornhouben.com 
BC
February 27, 2013 at 19:38
You sir, are an internet saint! I had been looking all over for a fix to vcenter services failing to start. I had just upgraded from AD 2003 R2 to 2008 R2 (behind the times, I know), so I figured my issues were somehow related to that. Restarting the vCenter SSO service did the trick and allowed other vcenter services to start up. Thank you!
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Bjorn Houben
February 27, 2013 at 19:44
Glad it was of help to you. Thanks for taking the time to leave a message, I really like that 🙂
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luismendeze
May 19, 2015 at 21:53
Thils article helped me out too, thank you Bjorn 🙂
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Bjorn Houben
June 3, 2015 at 06:48
Glad it was useful to you. Thanks for leaving a message.
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luismendeze
May 19, 2015 at 21:54
This post helped me out too, it was very usefull for me, thank you Bjorn 🙂
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