I've always edited the etc/hosts file on my esxi hosts in case there is a problem with DNS and was best practice in earlier versions of vmware. Is this still best practice? I like doing it because it know for fact what the resolution will be for the hosts in case DNS is wrong. I'd like to know who still does this or if I should stop.
I actually never did this with DNS servers in place. I think the main reason for editing the hosts file was to make sure HA worked properly. However, things changed and as of vSphere 5.0, HA doesn't depend on DNS resolution anymore.
As said only HA requires name resolution and till 4.x we used to edit the host entries . If we have a DNS configured for the host, then the names for the hosts/client can be resolved by the server
