I’m upgrading my home-lab environment to the GA release of vSphere. After enabling HA on my two node cluster there was trouble in paradise. Every time I “turned on VMware HA” the task eventually resulted in an unknown HA error. This usually happened around the 84%. I investigated two interesting log files which can be found at /var/log/vmware/aam.
aam_config_util_addnode.log
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd ] No AAM Primary Agents were found that would accept our connection.
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd ] Connection Unsuccessfully attempted at:
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd ]
05/26/09 09:48:17 [active_primary_ftcli] command did not run successfully on 'esx4-r'.
05/26/09 09:48:17 [active_primary_ftcli] 'esx-r' would not accept our connection.
05/26/09 09:48:17 [find_active_primary ] attempting to find an active primary.
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cli_cmd ] command is '/opt/vmware/aam/bin/ftcli -domain vmware -cmd "la -l"'
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd ] CMD: /opt/vmware/aam/bin/ftcli -domain vmware -cmd "la -l"
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd ] STATUS: 1
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd ] RESULT:
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd ] Unable to get Fully Qualified Domain Name
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd ] [Err:0] Unable to get Fully Qualified Domain Name
aam_config_util_listprimaries.log
05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args ] KEY: cmd VAL: listprimaries
05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args ] KEY: -z VAL: 1
05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args ] KEY: uname VAL: Linux
05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args ] KEY: shortname VAL: esx4-l
05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args ] KEY: domain VAL: vmware
05/26/09 10:17:14 [issue_cmd ] CMD: /opt/vmware/aam/bin/ft_gethostbyname esx4-l |grep FAILED
05/26/09 10:17:14 [issue_cmd ] STATUS: 0
05/26/09 10:17:14 [issue_cmd ] RESULT:
05/26/09 10:17:14 [issue_cmd ] ft_gethostbyname(esx4-l) FAILED
Ok, that sounds fair, there is a problem with hostname resolution, and this is the most common error source for VMware HA problems. Since I didn’t have a proper DNS server in my lab, I was relying on host files. Eventually the problem was caused by the short host name. When editing your host files don’t forget to add the short hostname after the fully qualified domain name.
192.168.178.180 myserver.domain.com myserver
