Configuration of host IP address is inconsistent on host - VMware HA issues

Duncan over at yellow-bricks.com has posted a very helpful VMware HA troubleshooting tip. Changing the IP-address of an ESX host and HA deals with fixing HA issues that arise after changing the ip address of ESX hosts. In summary, Duncan was helping a colleague that was having trouble reconfiguring HA on an ESX cluster, and even though all the standard steps for resolving the issue were followed the HA feature could not be enabled on the cluster. Duncan was able to to identify that the issue was caused because a HA agent auto-generated file still contained the wrong ip address information. Specifically the /etc/FT_HOSTS file was the culprit.

Read the yellow-bricks.com post for the full details, but I am copying the t-shooting and resolution steps here for my future knowledge base.

Note that it also appears as if there were host name changes from “bla-” to “fs-esx-”, but Duncan does not mention that change as impacting this issue.

1. examining the /var/log/vmware/vpx-rupgrade.log reveals:

VMwareerrortext=ft_gethostbyname and hostname -i return different addresses: 10.21.10.81, 10.21.5.12 and 10.21.1.21

[root@bla-01 /var/log/vmware]# hostname –i

10.21.1.21

2. The command “hostname -i” resulted in the following:

[root@bla-01 /var/log/vmware]# hostname –i

10.21.1.21

3. The command “ft_gethostbyname” returned the following:

[root@bla-01/opt/vmware/aam/bin]# ./ft_gethostbyname

10.21.10.81 fs-esx-01
10.21.5.12 fs-esx-01

4. FT_HOSTS which is automatically generated by the AAM Client(High Availability) was:

[root@bla-01 /etc]# more FT_HOSTS

# Auto-generated FT_HOSTS file. Timestamp: Mon Jun
2 19:05:09 2008
10.21.10.81 bla-01
10.21.5.12 bla-01
10.21.10.82 bla-02
10.21.5.14 bla-02
10.21.10.83 bla-03
10.21.5.16 bla-03

5. So I moved the FT_HOSTS to FT_HOSTS.BAK:

[root@bla-01 /etc]# mv FT_HOSTS FT_HOSTS.BAK

6. Reconfigured the cluster for HA and everything works like expected again:

[root@bla-01 /etc]# more FT_HOSTS

# Auto-generated FT_HOSTS file. Timestamp: Wed Jun
4 10:39:52 2008
10.21.1.21 fs-esx-01
10.21.5.12 fs-esx-01
10.21.1.22 fs-esx-02
10.21.5.14 fs-esx-02
10.21.1.23 fs-esx-03
10.21.5.16 fs-esx-03

Tags: esx, highavailability, how to, issues, vmware, yellow-bricks.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 9:21 am and is filed under blogs, esx, how to, vmware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.