Support Tip: The VMM service crashes or fails to start with Event ID 19999

~ Richard Mascarenhas| Support Engineer

We recently came across an issue in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM 2012) where the VMM service would crash and we wanted to pass along the info just in case you happened to run across it.

Issue: You find that you are unable to start the VMM service, or the VMM service crashes with the following Event ID info:

Event ID 19999
Clear the failed status of service in scvmm so we can scale out using SCVMM 2012 SP1
Virtual Machine Manager (vmmservice:3372) has encountered an error and needed to exit the process. Windows generated an error report with the following parameters:
Event:VMM20
P1(appName):vmmservice
P2(appVersion):3.1.6011.0
P3(assemblyName):ImgLibEngine
P4(assemblyVer):3.1.6011.0
P5(methodName):M.V.E.W.COMPort..ctor
P6(exceptionType):System.NullReferenceException
P7(callstackHash):a730

Cause: This can occur if the VMM database does not have the correct values for the COM ports for one or more VMs. To verify, open the SQL Management studio and run the following query on the VMM database:

SELECT v.Name, v.HWProfileID, COUNT(c.VCOMPortId)
FROM tbl_WLC_VObject v
LEFT JOIN tbl_WLC_VCOMPort c
ON v.HWProfileId = c.HWProfileId
GROUP BY v.HWProfileId, v.Name

This should give a list of all the VMs along with the HWProfileIds in the middle column and the Value in the third column. You should see a value of 2 assuming each VM has the default 2 COM ports. This is the value we assume to find.

Resolution: Before doing anything, be sure to take a backup of the VMM database. Now, if there is a value of 0 anywhere then you need to manually change the values to be 2.

First stop the VMM service if it’s running. Now, assuming we have a VM with a HWProfileId as 14FFE3AC-9427-4BB7-BA77-A723A84B9CBB and a value of 0 we will run the following script 2 times:

INSERT INTO tbl_WLC_VCOMPort
(HWProfileId, ParentType, PortType, PortNumber)
VALUES
(14FFE3AC-9427-4BB7-BA77-A723A84B9CBB', 3, 0, 1)

If the value was 1 then we only need to run the script only once.

If you see a value higher than 2, you need to first delete the exiting values so that they are 0. To do this, run the following:

DELETE FROM tbl_WlC_VCOMPort WHERE HWProfileID = 14FFE3AC-9427-4BB7-BA77-A723A84B9CBB'

When complete, run the first script again to verify that the value has been changed to 2. If there are multiple VMs with a value that is other than 2 then repeat the same process until the first script returns with output value of 2 for all rows.

Richard Mascarenhas| Support Engineer | Microsoft GBS Management and Security Division

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