We upgraded our VMware infrastructure to v5 back around the time it was released late last summer. Since then I’ve been having an issue where the Storage View feature of vCenter would not load. I would receive a mostly blank screen that has a link to update the Storage View. Clicking that link had 0 effect. I finally started messing around trying to troubleshoot a few weeks ago (after nearly 6 months without Storage View). Something I did resolved the issue and it seemed to be working since.
Today I loaded my VI Client up and clicked the Storage View tab to check on something. To my displeasure I realized SV was broken again. This time, I finally determined why – the server vCenter is installed on had a port conflict with another process, the port in question being 8080, which was also being used by IIS for some other service I had installed at some point in the past (certainly NOT at the time that SV broke originally). I changed the port that the IIS instance was running on, restarted the VMware services, and voila, SV worked again.
Like I said above, the IIS instance was running prior to upgrading to vSphere 5, so I’m not sure exactly what caused the conflict. I don’t know if vCenter 5 installs a new service to port 8080 by default or if I, in my infinite wisdom, set the port to use 8080. I know I set IIS to 8080 at one point to AVOID a port conflict with vCenter, however, I wasn’t aware that vCenter was running any web services on ports other than 80 and 443. Long story short, make sure that the vCenter Management Webservices HTTP service isn’t conflicting with anything else (according to VMware 8080 is the default port for the aforementioned service).