I have seen the following error repeat EVERY minute in the Windows Active Directory Web Services Log on Windows 2008 R2 Servers running VMware vCenter 4.1.
“Active Directory Web Services encountered an error while reading the settings for the specified Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services instance. Active Directory Web Services will retry this operation periodically. In the mean time, this instance will be ignored. Instance name: ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS”
To fix this look in the regestry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS\Parameters
for
Port SSL.
If Port SSL is already there as a string (REG_SZ), delete it and create a new REG_DWORD named Port SSL and set the value to 636 (Decimal). You then need to restart the two services “Active Directory Web Services” and “VMwareVCMSDS”. Not sure if both of these services needed to be restarted but I have always done this whenever I notice this error message without impacting anything
I have yet to discover anything not functioning while this error is occurring but it is annoying that it repeats every minute so I always ensure the registry key is correct on new implementations and correct it on any installation suffering from the issue.