Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Installing vCenter 6.0.0 gives: Installation of component VCSServiceManager failed with error code '1603'. Check the logs for more details.

I'm rolling out a new vCenter 6.0.0 install from scratch to test our environment on it, and quickly ran into a show stopper:

Installation of component VCSServiceManager failed with error code '1603'. Check the logs for more details.

I was installing on a fresh new Windows 2012R2 server with all the updates, but I hadn't installed the .NET 3.5 feature. 

The release notes from VMware mention this exact error, but in the context of an ipv4 address issue, so that wasn't much help, as all of my ipv4 addressing was correct. 

After a bit of poking around, I noticed that a 1603 error in a MSI is often due to .NET being missing.

After installing .NET 3.5 and updates, the install worked properly.

There is no mention of .NET being required in the Release Notes, the Windows Requirements, etc. 

Hopefully that saves someone a bit of time. :-)

Now let's see what that new Web Client performs like.