vCenter installation fails on Windows Server 2012
During the installation of vCenter 5.1 on a Windows server 2012 I ran into an issue where the installation of the vCenter failed. The prerequisite services installed without problems but the vCenter service failed to install. The installation stopped with a Failed to install VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage error.
Looking at the services I noticed that the vCenter services was already installed but not running. When I tried to manually start the vCenter server service it failed with an error regarding a dependency service not being available. The Profile Driven-Storage service fails to install because the vCenter service can’t start. Root cause is the dependency of the vCenter service on the ProtectedStorage service which doens’t exist in Windows Server 2012.
We need to remove the depency on the ProtectedStorage service from the depency list. Open regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpxd and edit the DependOnService registry key. Remove the ProtectedStorage entry from the list. Reboot the server. The vCenter service will start automatically once rebooted.
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Rerun the vCenter service installation from the control panel. The Profile Driven-Storage service will now be installed which completes the vCenter server service installation.