Last week I upgraded a customers vSphere 5.5 environment to vSphere 6. Everything went smooth, upgraded VSAN to v2 and even Veeam picked up the new vCenter 6 appliance without a hitch. But when I opened the vSphere Client (yeah I still use it sometimes… sorry for that) there were two plugin errors.
VMware vCenter Storage Monitoring Service
The plug-in failed to load on server(s) xxxxx due to the following error: Could not load file or assembly ‘VI, Version=5.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=xxxxx’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
This is an expected behaviour in VMware vCenter 6 because the “Storage Views” tab is no longer available in the vSphere 6.0 Client.
The cure is easy, just uninstall the old vSphere 5.x client(s) and the “error” is gone!
Auto Deploy
The following error occurred while downloading the script plugin from https://xxxxx:6502/vmw/rbd/extensions.xml: The request failed because of a connection failure. (Unable to connect to the remote server)
There are 2 ways to solve this issue :
1. Enable Auto Deploy on vCenter appliance through the vSphere Web Client.
Go to Administration -> System Configuration -> Services -> Auto Deploy and start the service.
2. Remove the plugin from the vCenter appliance :
If you don’t want to start the service but you want the error gone you will have to remove the plugin from vCenter.
To do this open a browser and go to https://%vCenterFQDN%/mob and log in in with your administrator credentials.
Click on “Content” :
Click on “ExtentionManager” :
Click on “UnregisterExtension” :
Fill in the value “com.vmware.vim.sms” and click “Invoke Method”
And you are done!
Thats more like it! No errors! 🙂
In case you have some other plugin errors here is a list of VMware vCenter plugins which you can remove in the same way as described above.
| Extension Name | Service Description |
| com.vmware.vim.eam | vSphere ESX Agent Manager |
| com.vmware.vim.inventoryservice | vCenter Inventory Service |
| com.vmware.vim.ls | Licensing Services |
| com.vmware.vim.sms | VMware vCenter Storage Monitoring Service |
| com.vmware.vim.sps | VMware vSphere Profile-drive Storage Service |
| com.vmware.vim.stats.report | Performance charts built-in extension |
| com.vmware.vim.stats.vsm | Service Manager |
| cim-ui | vCenter Hardware Status |
| health-ui | vCenter Service Status |
| hostdiag | Internal extension to declare diagnostic events from VMware Host systems |
| VirtualCenter | VirtualCenter dynamic events and tasks |
| com.vmware.orchestrator | VMware vRealize Orchestrator plugin (formerly known as VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in) |
| com.vmware.rbd | Auto Deploy |
| com.vmware.syslog | VMware Syslog Collector Configuration |
| com.vmware.vcDr | VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Extension |
| com.vmware.vcHms | vSphere Replication Management (VRM) |
| com.vmware.vcIntegrity | VMware vSphere Update Manager Extension |
| com.vmware.vShieldManager | vShield Manager |
| vCloud Director-1 | vCloud Director |
| com.vmware.vcops | vRealize Operations Manager (formerly known as vCenter Operations Manager) |
| com.vmware.vadm | VMware vRealize Infrastructure Navigator (formerly known as vCenterInfrastructure Navigator) |
| com.vmware.vdp | vSphere Data Protection 5.1 |
| com.vmware.vdp2 com.vmware.vdp2.config |
vSphere Data Protection 5.5/5.8 |
| com.vmware.vsan.health | vSAN Health Check Plug-in |
| com.vmware.heartbeattasks | vCenter Server Heartbeat |
| com.vmware.hbwc | vCenter Server Heartbeat |
| com.vmware.heartbeat | vCenter Server Heartbeat |
| com.neverfail.heartbeat | vCenter Server Heartbeat |
Using the vSphere Client with vSphere 6.0 isn’t the way to go in my opinion. It’s deprecated and it’s not possible to use the new features coming with vSphere 6.0. Use the vSphere Web Client, its much faster then the version shipped with vSphere 5.x and you can use the new features.
Hi Erik,
I totally agree with you, but sometimes it’s still damn handy to have it installed in addition to the web client. For example in case of disaster or trouble with the Web Client server or trouble with the load balancer in front of your Web Client servers. In that case it is nice to have a “clean” error free vSphere client :).
Marco