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.

bunchc on October 12, 2009 | Filed Under ESX, Troubleshooting, VM, vSphere

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