I recently experienced a strange issue when implementing the VMware Capacity Planner at a customer site. Once the collector software had been installed and I attempted to run the initial inventory of my target servers, the following error message was displayed in the capacity planners task pane.
ERROR: An unexpected error occurred! Module = VMware Capacity Planner Collector Function = ProcessJobs Source = vcpCollector Error = Permission denied(70:0:1000070)#
On first glance I thought this was an issue when querying a target server though either the remote registry or WMI. Some further research led me to VMware Knowledge Base article KB 1001396 which detailed the error listed above. Unfortunately the article detailed that this error is usually reported when running the collector on a Windows Server 2003 platform that is utilising hardened security methods, I was however using a Windows XP Professional machine as my collector platform. Ironically the suggested solution for this error in the VMware KB article is to install the collector on a Windows XP workstation.
After removing anti-virus applications, GPO's and several software re-installations later a colleague recommended resetting the local security policy on my Windows XP collector workstation back to default, in the eventuality the security policy applied via GPO had not removed correctly. After running a secedit command to restore the local security policy and re-running the inventory task in the capacity planner everything was now working as expected. To reset the local security policy of a Windows XP workstation, perform the following steps:
1. Click Start and select the Run menu item.
2. In the Run dialog box type CMD and click ok.
3. In the command prompt window type the following entry, without quotations, and press return on your keyboard:
"secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose"
4. Once you have pressed return on your keyboard you should then receive a "Task is completed" message and a warning message that an item could not be completed. You can safely ignore this message.
5. In the Capacity Planner software re-run the initial inventory task, and you should now see that the access denied error is no longer displayed.
For more information on resetting the local security policy of any Windows based operating system, please see the following URL: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313222
