A while ago I was performing a VMware Capacity Plan for a third party company. During the implementation of the planning software I experienced an issue collecting CPU, RAM and disk statistics for two particular servers. I noted that when running an inventory job in the capacity planning software, the following error was being produced:
RetrieveSystemUpTime: PdhVbGetDoubleCounterValue() has bad status. No uptime data
After a prolonged investigation of the issue I contacted VMware to see if they had experienced this problem. To some surprise, there was no entry in their internal knowledge base for this issue and the problem was passed to their developers in the United States. A week later, and it turned out this error is actually produced if the capacity planning software receives “invalid” data from a server. In my case, rebuilding the Windows Performance Counter Library Values resolved the issue. We could only assume these had become corrupt and were therefore sending incorrect values to the capacity planner. To rebuild your performance counters, please follow the steps detailed in Microsoft KB Article 300956: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300956
