vCenter Orchestrator Server Service Won't Start

This has happened to me twice now with vCO 5.5.1 running on Windows using the embedded database - once in a dev install in a lab and now also in my home lab. So figured it was time to write up the steps to sort it out.

Issue:

The vCO Orchestrator Server service won’t start. In the vCO log you find something similar  to:

[vcoInitializerScheduler-1] ERROR {} [ServerChecker] Server integrity problem: interface com.vmware.o11n.licensing.LicenseAttributes is not visible from class loader

and / or

[vcoInitializerScheduler-1] ERROR {} [ServerChecker] **************************************************************************************[vcoInitializerScheduler-1] ERROR {} [ServerChecker] **  An essential server component is missing or invalid, the server will be shutdown

[vcoInitializerScheduler-1] ERROR {} [ServerChecker] **************************************************************************************

The only information I can find about it is this communities post, which suggests moving the vCO database and the rest of the data folder to a fresh vCO instance.

Workaround:

Deploy a new vCO instance. Here’s the standard vCO library in the fresh instance, but none of my own content is of course available there yet.

As per the communites post, we now need to copy over the C:\Program Files\VMware\Orchestrator\app-server\data folder from the old server to the new instance. Make sure to stop the vCenter Orchestrator Server Service on the new instance first.

Now startup the vCenter Orchestrator Server Service and if you are in luck it will start this time.

When I log into the client, my own content is back - yay! I just need to re-install and configure any vCO plugins now.