I have Tomcat configured to run as a service using Systemd on CentOS 7.2. I can start Tomcat with no problems:
sudo systemctl start tomcat
Ah, never mind; this has been answered already on serverfault for general Java applications.
Basically Java programs sometimes don't send back the expected exit status when shutting down in response to SIGTERM. Adding the following to the tomcat.service
file fixes the problem:
[Service]
SuccessExitStatus=143