Migrate Storage – “Failed to Connect to Host”

This one came at me from left field recently. The task at hand was to cold migrate one of a Virtual Machine’s disks from it’s old LUN, to a new one with some more breathing room. Simple enough, no? We’ve all done it a million times. What happened however, was that I received a “Error: Failed to Connect to Host” message.

To triage this, I first logged into the host, and verified that networking was sane:

cat /etc/sysconfig/network

cat /etc/hosts

ping gateway, ping service console gateway, etc.

After verifying this was all good, I tried to reconfigure the host for VMware HA (to update the FT_HOSTS file, etc). No good, so I turned to Google (who wouldn’t) and came across this post written by Duncan Epping @ Yellow-Bricks. While I didn’t use the solution as posted on the site, some of the comments led me in the right direction, bringing me to:

1. Put the host into maintenance mode
2. Disconnect the host (Right click, disconnect)
3. Remove the host from vCenter (Right click, Remove)
4. Move /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg to vpxa.old
5. Connect the host to vCenter
6. Add to Cluster
7. Exit Maintenance mode

Hope this helps. Let me know in the comments.

Tagged as: ESX, Troubleshooting, VMware, vSphere