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.
champion!!! worked a treat!!! thank you!!
Just had this same problem. When I connected via IP address, I was doing this in my troubleshooting, the host would quickly change from the host IP to the IP address of my primary site’s gateway.
I followed your instructions and opened the vpxa.old file. The host IP was listed as having the remote site’s gateway address. Some more digging and EVERY ESXi client that was connecting via site-to-site VPN tunnel was listing the primary site gateway as it’s host address. Talk about a fuster cluck.
Not sure what happened with the OpenVPN tunnel but I went into Untangle Firewall (UTM box with OpenVPN) and made a few bypass rule changes. I went back and changed the VPXA.cfg files and voila! Success.