Restarting the VirtualCenter service remotely

While VirtualCenter service restart operations are rare, administrators find themselves doing just that. There are a number of reasons for needing to restart the service, such as a network interruption to the database. Here is a quick script you can run to restart the service:

sc \\SERVER1 stop “vpxd”
sc \\SERVER1 start “vpxd”

In the above example, Server1 is the name of the VirtualCenter server. The Windows SC command interacts with the service controller and functions like the service.msc snap-in from the command-line. The image below shows these two commands stopping then starting the service from a remote system:

Even better: the command can be run remotely on a Windows system with a Power User permission account on the VirtualCenter server — you may not even have to log in to the VirtualCenter server to run this task. When the service stops, the ESX hosts are unmanaged from a resource perspective, and features such as DRS and HA are not enforced.

Depending on your environment and the behavior you observe with the VirtualCenter service, you may wish to schedule a periodic restart of the service during a maintenance window. It is also a good idea to have notification if the service is not running. Keeping this service running is a critical part of a healthy and effective VI3 environment.