Thanks to Cody Bunch of the twittersphere helped me to solve the latest mystery within my vSphere environment: vCenter would fail to start after a reboot of the Windows 2008 vCenter Server VM. This has been plaguing me since I started this process, but it finally needed to be fixed!
The problem is that VMware Update Manager and VMware vCenter Server collide when they are both trying to access the MSSQL 2008 database for some odd reason.
The solution is fairly easy, add a service dependency on VMware Update Manager so that it requires VMware vCenter to start first. To do this open up regedit and navigate to HKLMSystemControlSet001servicesvmware-ufad-vci key and add a new Multi String Value named ‘DependOnService’. Give this new registry element a value of ‘vpxd’.
This will now place a dependency on VUM such that it requires vCenter to start first. Now on reboots, vCenter starts properly and I no longer have to manually start the service.
This can be only just what exactly I was trying to find. Thanks, C.S