View Composer 5 - Error 1920

We are a VMWare shop.  No other way to put it. I would say about 95% of the servers that I'm responsible for run on VMWare.  The other 5% need to be physical for one reason or another.  Recently, we decided to start the process of upgrading our environment to VMWare View 5. 

I built two 2008R2 servers...one to be used as the View Connection Server, the other to be used as the Virtual Center/View Composer server.  For those of you new to VMWare, View Composer needs to be run on the Virtual Center server.

Everything was going along fine until the View Composer installation.  It got to the point of starting services, then would give me "Error 1920 - Service VMWare View Composer (svid) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services."  Hmmm...ok...let's look at Event Viewer.  Event ID 0 - Failed to perform VMWare View Composer module initialization.  It was trying to pass a SQL query to my SQL server, but it didn't like the syntax.  Ok...let's go to Google and see if anyone else had this problem.

Since View 5 is still pretty new, not a lot out there.  I ran across a few articles saying to run the service as a domain accout, make sure the service can interact with the desktop, check DB permissions, etc...  Needless to say, none worked.

Here is how I fixed the issue:  I had a feeling the problem lied somewhere with the ODBC SQL driver.  SO, I decided to not use the default SQL driver installed with 2008R2.  Instead, I installed the SQL Native client for 2008R2.  I set up a new ODBC connection using that...and just like that, the install finished with no issues.

Welcome!

Ok, so this is my first post.  Let me start off by introducing myself and maybe explain what I'm doing here.  My name is Chris and I've been in the IT field for about 10 years now...ok, really 9 1/2 but who's counting.  To be honest, I didn't even think about computers until after college.  Up to that point, the only thing I knew how to do was write a word document for school and print it out.  If the computer wasn't working...Oh well!  So after college I took my Mass Communications degree and decided to go work at a truck wash...washing trucks ironically.  VERY glamorous, I know!! About 3 months into that I had it...I had to make a change.  So, I went back to school to learn computer networking at The Chubb Institute...which is now The Anthem Institute from what I understand. From there I was able to get a job with a small company in CT (about 200 employees or so) as a help desk technician.  I've been at that company for about 10 years now, and I've worked my way up to Network Engineer. 

Ok, enough of my background...I'm sure you're all half asleep!  The reason I'm here is this: Working for a small company, in a small infrastructure group, you're thrown into a lot of situations where you need to learn the ins and outs of a product quickly...and by quickly I mean yesterday! The upside of this is that you get your hands on a lot of new and exciting technology, and have the opportunity to learn it from all angles.  The downside is that there isn't enough time in the day to get everything done that NEEDS to be done! You're almost always pulled in 25 different directions at any given moment, so trying to keep your head above water can be, for lack of a better word, interesting.

What I'd like to do is post some of the challenges I face on a daily basis, and maybe a few things I do to make my life just a little bit easier.

So, here we go!