How to Check, Start, Stop or Restart Windows version of vCenter 6.x

 Something we  rebooted vCenter server and post reboot when tried to connect to vCenter using Web client, end up with following error,

This error is something which usually occurs when there there is some issue with vCenter Web client, probably the service is set to manual or somehow got stopped.

Ideally Web client service should have startup type set as Automatic and in start state.

To verify this, opened Services and to my surprise couldn't find the vCenter Web Client Service listed there, even vCenter service was not there (ideally this shouldn't be the case).

So, here how would you check the status of Web Client Service or for any other service not listed in Services.

For Windows version of vCenter, to list the vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller services,

·                     Open command prompt as Administrator and change the directory to C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\bin (or any other relevant path, if you didn't install vCenter on default location)

  Now we will use Service-control utility, available here to check the status of service or perform a related operation on it.

      To view the available option, run service-control --help

·                     Run following command to list vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller services,

          service-control --list-services

·                     Run this command to view the current status of all vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller services: 

    service-control --status

 

     To check the status of individual services, use this,

 

      For Web client Service:

    service-control --status vsphere-client

 

  For vCenter service:

         service-control --status vpxd

 From here, you can start, stop any of vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller   services using below cmd,

service-control --start 'Service Name'

Or to start all services,

service-control --start --all

Note:To perform a dry run of the command, add the option --dry-run to the command, doing so will display what actions the command will run without executing the actions. 

Hope this would be helpful