Recomposing virtual desktops in a VMware View 5.x pool throws the error: “Internal View Composer error. Contact your administrator.”

Problem

You attempt to recompose virtual desktops in a VMware View 5.x pool from within VMware View Administrator but receive the following error message:

Internal View Composer error. Contact your administrator.

You’ve verified that the VMware View Composer service is started:

Solution

Before I begin, note that the error:

Internal View Composer error. Contact your administrator.

… is a very generic one and the best way to troubleshoot the issue is to navigate to the following directory where the VMware View Composer logs are:

C:\ProgramData\VMware\View Composer\Logs

… then open the vmware-viewcomposer.log file:

What I usually do is simply hit CTRL+F to bring up the Find window and search for the string error:

Traversing through the error entries revealed the following:

2012-11-27 00:38:59,840 | 3             | FATAL | Sim.ServiceCore.SimServiceApiImpl - Error: fail to execute web service call: AddDeploymentGroup
VMware.Sim.CommonLib.Exception.SimAdConnectionException: The specified domain does not exist or cannot be contacted. ---> System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.ActiveDirectoryObjectNotFoundException: The specified domain does not exist or cannot be contacted.
   at System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Domain.GetDomain(DirectoryContext context)

The immediate idea I had after seeing how it appears to be an issue with the View Composer contacting the domain, is that we recently decommissioned old domain controllers so the DNS entries on the vCenter server where the View Composer resided was out of date.  Note the following entries in the DNS server addresses for the vCenter server’s NIC card:

The error went away once I updated the 192.168.1.x entries that point to the old DNS servers to the new ones.

**Note that if you’re wondering why we didn’t catch this earlier, it’s because the vCenter server in this environment is not joined to the domain.