I have a cluster of 15 ESXi 5.0 hosts, with a 5.1 vCenter / Enterprise Plus license. This has been running well for quite some time, but two of my hosts were disconnected tonight and I am troubleshooting it now.
When I go to reconnect them, I get an error saying that "A general system error has occured: Timed waiting for vpxa to start". I did some searching and found that this was generally related to snapshots, but none of the VMs on either of my un-connectable hosts have any snapshots at all.
I've tried:
- Restarting vCenter services
- Rebooting vCenter
- Restarting services on the hosts
- Warm reboot of hosts
- Hard/cold reboot of hosts
- Powering off all VMs on hosts and entering maintenance mode
- DNS is working between hosts and vCenter, and vice versa
- Time is correct on vCenter and hosts
- Network connectivity is good between vCenter and hosts (all on the same switch)
However nothing seems to work, and I still can't add these hosts back to my cluster. What's odd is that I can connect to them directly with vSphere, but I just can't get them back into my vCenter. I get through the usual prompts when adding it (where it asks you to assign a license, etc) and it sees the VMs on the host as I'm adding it, but times out with this error after about 5 minutes.
Any insight would be very much appreciated.