The VirtualCenter Server might crash when using an older ODBC driver with Oracle 9i
Details
A short time after starting, the VirtualCenter Server might crash when using an Oracle 9i database. This is caused by the lack of necessary SQL data type support in older Oracle ODBC drivers.
When attempting to connect to VirtualCenter, an error similar to the following appears:
A general system occurred: Error[vdbODBCError](-1) "ODBC error(HY000) - [Oracle][ODBC][Ora]ORA-12704: character set mismatch is returned when executing SQl statement "INSERT INTO VXP_EVENT_ARG (EVENT_ID, ARG_D, ARG_TYPE, ARG_DATA, OBJ_TYPE, OBJ_NAME) VALUES(?,?,?,?,?,?)"
VMware Infrastructure Client cannot connect to VirtualCenter
Solution
Upgrade the Oracle ODBC driver to version 9.2.0.8 on the VirtualCenter Server machine.