I encountered the following exception when trying to start our AdminServer today:
<May 30, 2013 1:04:27 PM CEST> <Critical> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000386> <Server subsystem failed. Reason: java.lang.NumberFormatException: null java.lang.NumberFormatException: null at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:454) at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:527) at weblogic.ldap.EmbeddedLDAP.validateVDEDirectories(EmbeddedLDAP.java:1104) at weblogic.ldap.EmbeddedLDAP.start(EmbeddedLDAP.java:242) at weblogic.t3.srvr.SubsystemRequest.run(SubsystemRequest.java:64) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace > <May 30, 2013 1:04:27 PM CEST> <Notice> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to FAILED> <May 30, 2013 1:04:27 PM CEST> <Error> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000383> <A critical service failed. The server will shut itself down> <May 30, 2013 1:04:27 PM CEST> <Notice> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to FORCE_SHUTTING_DOWN>
This does not really explain what went wrong, but the solution is to remove the replicas.prop file and restart the AdminServer again.
The replicas.prop file is located at :
$DOMAIN/servers/AdminServer/data/ldap/conf/replicas.prop
Rename (move) replicas.prop to replicas.prop.bak and retry the startWeblogic. In my case this solved the not starting server.