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:
- Put the host into maintenance mode
- Disconnect the host (Right click, disconnect)
- Remove the host from vCenter (Right click, Remove)
- Move /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg to vpxa.old
- Connect the host to vCenter
- Add to Cluster
- Exit Maintenance mode
Hope this helps. Let me know in the comments.
