I am currently a student and having an issue with adding a host under a datacenter in the Web Client. The error i receive is License not available to perform this operation. License file download from IP Address to vCenter Server failed due to exception" vim.fault.HostConnectFault. After a week of troubleshooting my group and even the professor is stumped on the issue as it makes contact with the server and adds the host but stalls at 80% then fails and removes the host. We have even started the ESXI OS from scratch which did not make much of a difference. This is happening on version 5.5 and i would appreciate any help i could possibly get. Thanks!
What's the ESXi host's current licensing status? Is it still running in evaluation mode, or did you already enter a license key (e.g. a free Hypervisor license).
Which license is used for the vCenter Server? An Essentials or Foundation editition is limited to a maximum of three hosts.
So the vCenter Server license is ok, but what about the ESXi host?
One more thing to check is DNS. Although this may work without DNS configuration, it's recommended that the ESXi host's name, as well as the vCenter name is properly resolvable.
I have looked at the DNS and it seems to be configured properly as i thought that may be the issue. It is running the correct DNS that matches our campuses DNS.
Assuming that you don't have NAT or any other unusual network configurations in place, I'd suggest you reboot the vCenter Server to see whether this resolves the issue.
