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Ducati21
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Version 4.1 hosts won't add to vcenter

I recently built a new environment on ESX 4.0 all went well and had no issues at all. Then it was announced ESX support\dev would cease in the future so rather than roll out ESX i decided to upgrade my host to ESXi and use the latest 4.1 release. I put my 4th host into maint mode, removed from vcenter, rebuilt with esxi 4.1 and then could not add it back into vcenter. vmodl.fault.hostcommunication was the error. This pointed to a DNS issue, so i diagnosed that over and over and did it right (worked on esx also). I then thought perhaps my certs were wrong, re-did those. Still same errors.

I rebuilt a new Vcenter server, new database, new dns setup installed esxi 4.1, still get vmodl.fault.hostcommunication trying to add the host to the vcenter datacenter. I spent a week doing everything i could and trying every fix i could find and nothing worked. I found if i approved the hosts cert manually in vcenter it would add the host then after 10 second say disconnected.

So after all that i looked on my desk and saw the old ESXi version 4.0 disk. Thought surely not, was there a bug in the 4.1 installer. I installed esxi 4.0, created a VM, ran up vcenter did all my normal dns setup and viola, 1st attempt host joined vcenter without issue, as did every other host and my old ESX hosts.

So after a week of wasted time i can conclude that unless there is some mystery requirement that the build of 4.1 that i downloaded (the day after VMware announced ESXi would be the host going fowards) has a bug.

Can anyone clarify if there is a known issue with this or if there is some new installation process that works for ESXi 4.1 that is different from what you would use previously

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Josh26
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Hi,

Yep, that'll be your issue.

View solution in original post

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Josh26
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Hi,

You referred to upgrading ESXi several times - did you upgrade vCenter?

vCenter must be at 4.1 to add an ESXi 4.1 host.

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Ducati21
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hmm good point i am on v4.0 of vcenter, i didn't download a new one of those. So that is the issue?

I would have assumed that some error checking could be built in or that any of my many searches would ahve turned something up. I guess its a rather new error.

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Josh26
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Hi,

Yep, that'll be your issue.

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bsti
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I had the same issue, with the same exact failure method. Upgrading to VCenter 4.1 resolved it.

I wish the error you received when doing this was a bit more precise...

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