Can't PING vCenter Appliance 5.5 or Configure Lookup Service

[ishraqiyun77]

Hi, so after taking the Stanly online class, realizing how little prepared it made me for the actually exam, realizing I should probably complete Net+ and MCSA first, idiotically buying the voucher and then realizing it needed to be used be the end of this year, I am scrambling to prep for the exam at the end of next month. Essentially just going through the exam blueprint.

All that aside, I'm learning alot and making some progress. I am using VMWare workstation 10 to simulate what would be physical hosts: thus far one ESXi (192.168.1.3), vCenter Server Appliance (192.168.1.5), and a Server 2012 (192.168.1.2). They are on their own private network not connected to the internet. I have WS2012 setup as the DHCP, NTP, and DNS server under domain vmware.com (esxi1.vmware.com, vcenter.wmare.com, etc).

vSphere Client and ESXi communicate fine. I can't connect with vSphere Client or even ping the vCenter appliance although I have gone in and setup the static IP, subnet mask, DNS, and NTP settings. There is a DNS entry for the domain and host. Can't connect to https://192.168.1.5:5480 via the Web Client.Figured it might be a firewall issue, so turned it off completely on WS2012 and the issue persists. Server appliance Lookup service status is unconfigured, but I do have all the prerequisites installed (SSO, Inventory Services,Web Client and installed in the correct order) referring to the vmware.com domain.

I have been on the internet all day reading "solutions" to the issue, but none seem to work. Most require you to be able to access it via the Web Client, but that doesn't work. I went ahead and installed an instance of vCenter Server on WS2012 so I could make some progress and it seems to be working fine, but would like to know why I can't get Appliance working.

Thanks in advance!

[RyanH84]

Hi,

Out of interest, if you drop your main host(desktop) running Workstation,  into the virtual network that these machines live on, are you able to get to the web address from your machine browser(s)?

If it were me, I'd give it a go to rule out server 2012.

Cheers,

Ryan

[ishraqiyun77]

Hi, your response helped me considerably in discovering something I overlooked!

I thought I'd try to ping the Appliance from the host before I started moving things and it worked. I then decided to setup up the Appliance for DHCP instead of static to see what IP it got assigned. It gave it a 192.168.0.x instead of a 192.168.1x number so it was actually looking at my home router and not WS2012. I looked at the network settings for that vCenter VM in Workstation--which I had looked at probably 20-times already--and noticed it was setup as a bridged connection to the physical network. Ha! :smileyblush:

Changed it to host-only and vCenter can now be pinged. Just being a noob on my part.

[RyanH84]

Glad my suggestion jump started your noggin'

That's what we are all here for I guess, nice one on getting it sorted!