Greetings. We are in the process of migrating our hosts to new hardware. We had three working hosts running ESXi 5.5.0-1331820 with the vCenter Appliance on one of them. Everything was working fine. In the process of moving virtual machines around, the vCenter Appliance was deleted (intentionally). We recreated the vCenter Appliance from the 5.5.0.5201 OVA and ran through the setup wizard same as before.
Now when adding one of the existing hosts to the vCenter, it finds the host and displays all the information. When finish is clicked, it quickly runs up to 80% and the host shows up, then disconnects. The log shows: add standalone host, added host, cannot connect host in datacenter; error connecting host, removed host in datacenter.
The error that shows is: Cannot contact the specified host (x.x.x.x). The host may not be available on the network, a network configuration problem may exist, or the management services on this host may not be responding.
Now the stupid thing is that we cannot even add the host that the vCenter appliance is on. Also, all hosts and the vCenter appliance are on the same management network. There is no firewall blocking any ports. I read through a bunch of the Knowledge Base postings and most are regarding incorrect IP addresses or blocked ports or the like. I checked through everything and couldn't find anything wrong.
Last thing is that we blew away the ESXi host that had the vCenter Appliance on it and re-installed ESXi 5.5.0-1623387 (slightly newer version than before) and then reinstalled the vCenter appliance on it exactly the same as before. Now we can add that host but still cannot add the other hosts. So it appears the issue is something with the hosts and not the vCenter appliance.
Anyone have any ideas?