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After installation of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1, setup finishes without any errors, but when you try to start the program it tells the Virtual Machine Manager (vmmservice)service is not started. When you take a look at services indeed the service is not started, when you try to start the service it starts but almost immediate it crashes.

Taking a look at the System Event Log there are a couple of Event ID 7031 source: Service Control Manager events:
“The System Center Virtual Machine Manager service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 100 milliseconds: Restart the service.”

In the Application Event Log you will see a Event ID: 19999 Source Virtual Machine Manager:
“Virtual Machine Manager (vmmservice:3620) 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):Engine.Common
P4(assemblyVer):3.1.6011.0
P5(methodName):M.V.E.SqmRefresher.IsRefreshRequired
P6(exceptionType):System.FormatException
P7(callstackHash):5104
.”

Also in the Application Event Log you will see a Event ID: 1 Source Virtual Machine Manager:
“System.FormatException: String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.
at System.DateTime.Parse(String s, IFormatProvider provider)
at System.Convert.ToDateTime(String value)
at Microsoft.VirtualManager.Engine.SqmRefresher.IsRefreshRequired(String refreshTime)
at Microsoft.VirtualManager.Engine.SqmRefresher.RefreshData(SQMSessionManager manager)
at Microsoft.VirtualManager.Engine.RefreshDriver`1.RefreshThreadFunction(Object obj)-2146233033

Problem signature:
P1: vmmservice
P2: 3.1.6011.0
P3: Engine.Common
P4: 3.1.6011.0
P5: M.V.E.SqmRefresher.IsRefreshRequired
P6: System.FormatException
P7: 5104
P8:
P9:
P10:”

Solution:
After a couple of different approaches and reinstallation the problem solution was that I installed the Windows Server 2012 server with the Dutch region setting. So the date and time were set to the Netherlands, when I changed the Region format to English (United States) and did a new installation setup finished a lot quicker and the services stays started.

So conclusion do not change the Date and Time setting when trying to install System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1.

Last week microsoft released Windows Management Framework (WMF) 3.0 which includes Powershell 3.0 (KB2506146 for Windows 2008 SP2 and KB2506143 for Windows Server 2008 R2) as an optional Windows update. So everyone can approve and install the update via Windows update, WSUS or any other updating mechanism you are using.

But installing this update on a Small Business Server (SBS) 2008 and 2011 or on an Exchange Server 2007 and 2010 will give all kind of trouble.

Symptoms for an Exchange Server:
Installation of Exchange update rollups will fail one of the errors is: error code of 80070643.

The Exchange Team wrote this blog about this issue. It states: “Windows Management Framework 3.0 (specifically PowerShell 3.0) is not yet supported on any version of Exchange except Exchange Server 2013. If you install Windows Management Framework 3.0 on a server running Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010, you will encounter problems, such as Rollups that will not install, or the Exchange Management Shell may not run properly.”

Symptoms for a Small Business Server:
When running some SBS wizards like the Fix My Network wizard it will end up with errors about access denied for the Exchange Management Shell.
Also other kind of problems may occur with the Exchange and / or SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and as written for Exchange Servers installation of Exchange update rollups may fail.

On the Small Business Server Blog there is a post on these issues.

Recommendation for both Exchange and Small Business Servers is to NOT install the Windows Management Framework 3.0 update at this time. If you already installed the update and encoutered the previously described problems, uninstall the update. Your server should be fine when it comes back online after a restart.

Update:
There is another problem reported in the Small Business Technet forum uninstallation of the also removes a registry key that gives problems to the event log. This is the key that is deleted: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ WINEVT \ Channels \ ForwardedEvents”

Anytime later in the same post there is a mention that the updates are removed from Microsoft Update:

As a result of these regressions and feedback from customers and experts like you, we have expired the WMF 3.0 Update for all platforms (Windows 7, Server 2008, and Server 2008 R2) as of 5:07 pm PDT.

doug neal
Microsoft Update (MU)