HA failing to config after upgrade to 4.1

[Darktan]

Hello kids.... Here is my dilemma.

I needed to upgrade my vCenter and ESX hosts from 4.0 to 4.1 to support an Exchange 2010 environment. I upgraded my physical vCenter server to 4.1 (latest patch version etc..) on a 2008 64 bit machine with no problems. I then followed the VMWare KB to do a host upgrade of the machines using the CLI. I have a total of 5 hosts that I upgraded. They all upgraded just fine with one exception. The last host I upgraded went fine, but when I went to take it out of maintenance mode and back into the cluster, it goes to configure HA and at about 80% starts to hang and then fails. The only message I get in the tasks is:

HA agent on $SERVER_NAME in cluster Production in $LOCATION has an error: 
Cannot complete the HA configuration
error
4/19/2011 3:36:24 PM
Configuring HA
$SERVER_NAME

I thought it might be an issue with the update so I wiped the ESX install and built it from scratch. I end up with the same error. I'm not sure where to start looking now. Luckily, I have a spare host for patching purposes so this is not affecting my production environment, but I do need to clear this up soon. Any help?

Peace

--Todd

[bulletprooffool · Accepted solution]

There is a kb article for troubleshooting HA issues:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100159...

[Darktan]

Thank you for that. That will come in handy.

Actually the issue was someone had loaded ESXi onto the server instead of ESX in an attempt to 'help' (I will soon have said person's head on a pike outside the server room as a warning to others who make undocumented changes to production environments). Once I reloaded ESX onto the machine, it took a couple tries but HA finally enabled.