Today I once again upgraded a vCenter installation and afterwards I wanted to use the RVC, but I always got the following error when trying to open the RVC:

C:/Program Files/VMware/vCenter Server/ruby/lib/ruby/2.1.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:55:in `require’: 193: %1 is not a valid Win32 application. – C:/Program Files/VMware/vCenter Server/ruby/lib/ruby/2.1.0/x64-mingw32/zlib.so (LoadError)
…..

So … hm … fubar. It seems that there still remain some old files on the FS when upgrading and those old files seem to cause some trouble.

To fix the problem you could try to uninstall just the vmware-ruby.msi and vmware-rvc.msi (I uninstalled both, maybe it’s enough to uninstall only the rvc-package) and reinstall. After uninstalling the file there will still be an folder rvc at “C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server” – rename it before reinstallling the MSI-packages to get a clean installation!
Attention – VMware passes some parameters to the MSI-files . If you just doubleclick on the files, they will get installed, but not under:
C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server

I used the parameters from the upgrade which were:

F:\vCenter-Server\Packages>msiexec /i VMware-ruby.msi ALLUSERS=1 ARPSYSTEMCOMPON
ENT=1 INSTALLPATH=”C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\” APPDATAPATH=”C:\Prog
ramData\VMware\vCenterServer\”

F:\vCenter-Server\Packages>msiexec /i VMware-rvc.msi ALLUSERS=1 ARPSYSTEMCOMPONE
NT=1 INSTALLPATH=”C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\” APPDATAPATH=”C:\Progr
amData\VMware\vCenterServer\”