Plug in fails to connect to VMware Data Recovery service

firewalls?

If the Control Panel is to be believed then all firewalls are Off.

I am at a loss - this is doing my head in!!

I did a 'complete' uninstall and got the most recent software I could find on the VMware site.  I installed that and still no joy.  I say 'complete' because when I fired it up vSphere client somehow knew the last screen I looked at using the version I removed.  Perhaps the uninstall isn't very clean? Yet another straw clutched.

is this only this client which is affected?

have you checked the plugin is enabled on the client?

Is your firewall service actually disabled??

It seems to be the only PC affected. I installed the same software on a test PC which is Windows 7 Ultimate (not Professional like mine) and not in our AD domain and it worked first time. By 'enabled' do you mean listed in the vSphere Client?

The firewall service was indeed started but I got the same result after stopping it though. I never realised the service stayed alive after setting the firewall to Off!! You'd think Windows would take the hint and stop the damned thing.

Have you checked the VMWare logs on the client?
It's in C:\user\%username%\AppData\Local\VMware\vpx\ folder.


Also check the cache.xml in C:\user\%username%\AppData\Local\VMware\vpx\PluginCache
It should look like this:

 <PluginStoreItem>
    <Type>DLL</Type>
    <FileName>C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Plugins\Data Recovery\Data Recovery.dll</FileName>
    <AsseblyName>Data Recovery, Version=2.0.0.50, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null</AsseblyName>
    <ObjectType>BackupUI.VmBackupPlugin</ObjectType>
  </PluginStoreItem>

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Thanks for that.  The cache.xml entries look identical albeit there is a lot of other gubbins in that file - I presume that isn't important which is why you didn't mention it?

I'm afraid I don't know what I'm looking for in the logs as this is all new to me.  There are currently 8 in total - are they just created when the vSphere Client is started or does it write entries in there when I do certain things like trying to connect to the Data Recovery appliance?

I would have posted the latest or all of them for someone to look at but I don't want to make them available to all in case this poses a security risk.

I've deleted the DLL again - the one that VMware support asked me to - as  I did a re-install last night but it crops up in several places and I'm not sure which is the correct one. Support told me it would be in ...windows\system32 but there isn't one on this Win7 PC - they are all in c:\program files (x86) subdirectories.  Still no joy. I recall that I had some kind of problem with this on XP and had to delete the same DLL but in that case it got rid of the problem! I got a colleague who runs the same OS on his laptop to try and connect and he was successful. To recap, if I try and login using the appliance's IP address it immediately resolves to the actual name. If it does that then I presume the client and device are talking and it can't be a port problem?

It's a really strange one

VMware support didn't have a clue and they said that my idea of running it in Windows' XP mode was "probably the best thing to do".