Can't open console from vCenter unless I'm logged directly into the host also

[dangingerich]

This is a really weird one.  I just added a new host to replace our current host for infrastructure VMs for a test lab.  The plan was to add two in a cluster so if one failed we could bring back VMs like our wiki, DNS, and test domain controllers quickly, and not be left dead in the water.  So, when I added it to the vCenter server, I added it as a cluster, just waiting for the second one to arrive to be built and added. 

Well, all seemed to go well until I migrated a few VMs to the new host.  They'd run properly, but I cannot pull up the console for any of them directly from the vCenter server, either from the vsphere client software or the web client.  It gives me the error "Unable to connect to MKS: failed to connect to server IP:902".  The weird part about it is that the consoles work fine if I use the vsphere client to log into the host directly and then just minimize it. 

I have not been able to find any other listing of this among the hundreds google search results.  I have searched for it and researched it for the last several days. 

The vCenter server is version 5.5.

The new host is version 5.5.

The vCenter server is Windows 2008r2 with the firewall completely turned off,  (I left it on at first, but while troubleshooting, I turned it off.  It made no difference.) 

The vCenter server is fairly newly built.  I failed to run an upgrade from 5.1 on the previous one, so I wound up just building a new one from scratch back about two weeks after 5.5 became available. 

This works fine on all other (8) hosts, ranging from 5.0 to 5.5.

The VMs were moved from a 5.1 host and are all version 8 virtual hardware

This isn't an emergency, considering I can still access the VMs with this workaround, and I'm the only one who access this host at all.  I'm just baffled with this behavior. 

[memaad]

Hi,

Had quick look into this KB, might be helpful to you

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=749640

Regards

Mohammed Emaad

[abhilashhb]

First thing to do would be to go to vCenter server. open /etc/hosts file and resolve the New Server's DNS name and IP. Just add an entry. And you will not get this error.

[dangingerich]

Yeah, I found that KB article before, but nothing there applied.  Our network doesn't block anything, DNS is fine, the firewall policy on the host is set up as default and everything it needs it open, the vCenter server doesn't even have the firewall turned on, and my laptop firewall is turned off by IT policy.  Thanks anyway.

I have confirmed that DNS lookup from the vCenter server works just fine.  I don't need to enter an entry in the hosts file.  When I ping by name, it translates it to the right address and pings back and forth just fine.  I'd rather not make changes to the hosts file because this is a test lab, with frequent changes in network configurations.  I happen to have a project right now to rearchitect the entire lab network due to department changes.  Changing the hosts files in any systems would increase the complexity of the project considerably.  I avoid that at all costs.