Start Or Restart VCenter Server - VConnect-IT

We all know that vCenter server comprises of many components and each component has its own functionality and a service is running for each component. During troubleshooting we may end up in restarting these services to isolate the issue,  it is made simple now by having an option to restart the services from vSphere WebClient as and when needed by following method

Login to Webclient with admin privilege:

Goto Home –>Click System Configuration icon under Administration section

In the System Configuration page, you will see the services list

By highlighting the service , you can see the service status and options to restart/stop the service in the right side panel

So simple , isn’t it ?

Now thing about a scenario that webclient is not accessible , vCenter service is down, PSC is also down, in such case we will lose the option to access the webclient to preform service actions. In such scenario, we have a command line option via ssh session to vCenter server and perform the same action

I have taken vCenter Server appliance version 6.7 with embedded PSC to explain the steps

We can perform many actions via ssh session to vCenter server.

• Listing the vCenter Server Appliance services
• Starting the vCenter Server Appliance services
• Stopping the vCenter Server Appliance services
• Restarting a particular service

Steps are as follows:

Launch a putty session (ssh) to vCenter appliance and login as root

We can work on services with the help of command “service-control”, binary is located in /bin directory

Goto /bin

Now we are in the desired directory, we are ready to execute the command

To see the what are all the options available with the command,

run

In the above screenshot, we can see what are all the actions can be performed on services using this command

Checking the status of the service(s)

Basic syntax of the command is

service-control <argument> <servicename>

Let us see how to list the services

Command is service-control –list-services, this command will list out all the services related VMware irrespective of their running state

In order to find the running status of all services , run the following command

service-control –status –all

To find the status of particular service , then the command should be

service-control –status <service name>

Example

service-control –status vmware-vmon

Start/Stop Service(s)

Now we see how these service can be stopped/started. We do not have a direct command to restart.

Syntax :

service-control –start/stop <service name>

I have picked a service vsphere-client and performed the action stop/status/start, following screenshot has the output

Stopping the vCenter Server Appliance services:

In some cases we may have to restart all the services of vCenter Server, in that case we can restart all the running services in one command

service-control –stop all

Now the services are stopped, let us check the status of all the services

You can notice all the services are in stopped state

To start all the services

service-control –start all

You can check the status again by running the service-control –status all command.

Hope this article help you while troubleshooting vCenter service service issues.

For more information, you may also refer to the KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2109881

Happy Reading!!