VMware View 4.6 linked clone pool provisioning fails with multiple errors

I was called by a client today asking me to to have a look at their VMware View 4.6 for their VDI infrastructure that was reporting vCenter was down.  Fixing vCenter wasn’t too difficult as a few reboot and re-initialization of VMware Heartbeat got the services back up.  With all of the arrows in VMware View pointing upwards and green:

… I went ahead check check on the pools only to notice that all them had a red x beside them.  What I noticed was that as soon as I re-enabled by selecting the pool, clicking on Status, then Enable Provisioning, I would see that View sends the commands:

1. Clone the virtual machine (you can see that the source is the replica with the name: replica-1fab7069…)
2. Add tag
3. Reconfigure virtual machine
4. Delete the virtual machine

After a deleting the created virtual machines, the pool would error out and stop provisioning.  Navigating to the Status tab of the pool would show various messages on the 3 pools I had.  Sorry about the lack of screenshots as I was rushing to troubleshooting this so didn’t actually capture any of them but the message would show up in the highlighted area below:

The 2 pools that already existed would error out with the following messages (their respective KB links are included):

Deploying a linked desktop pool fails with the error: Selected parent VM is not accessible (1024566)
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1024566

View Manager Admin console displays the error: Error during provisioning: Unexpected VC fault from View Composer (Unknown) (2014321)
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2014321

The new pool I created with a completely new master image with a new snapshot would fail with the following error:

Error during provisioning: Unable to find folder (1038077)
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1038077

In addition to the errors above, I would also see the error: sdd was not found in the recent tasks on vCenter before the pool errors out.

After spending hours reviewing logs, rebooting servers without any luck, I finally came across this forum thread:

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/304131?start=0&tstart=0

… and went ahead to uninstall then reinstall the same version of the View Composer with the Create a new SSL Certificate option (the only other option is use the existing one).  I noticed that I would still get the error:

View Manager Admin console displays the error: Error during provisioning: Unexpected VC fault from View Composer

… once Composer was reinstalled, so I proceeded to restart vCenter which was also where the Composer was installed and once the services came back up all of the pools began to provision but the status of it would end up being either of the following:

1. agent unreachable (missing)
2. unknown (missing)
3. provisioned (missing)

… then the pool would throw the same error as before:

Error during provisioning: 10/6/13 11:20:26 PM ADT: Unexpected VC fault from View Composer (Unknown): see event log for full error

Further troubleshooting of making sure the DHCP scope isn’t out of address leases, AD accounts are cleaned out, etc didn’t lead me any closer to a resolution so as I ran out of ideas, I figure I’ll just change the service account for vCenter and View Composer to my own login which has full permissions to everything:

I’m not sure why but this corrected the problem.

I hope this helps anyone out there who might come across this issue as it took quite a bit of time for me to figure it out because other than the error messages I found in the Status tab of the pools, I couldn’t find anything in the View Connection server logs and the Windows event logs.