In this second blog post about VCF and errors, I discuss this error, VCF error commission hosts: Failed to connect to the host – Certificate Error.
When we try to add hosts to VCF with commission hosts, I get the error: Failed to connect to the host. Ensure that the host is reachable, it has a valid certificate with a fully qualified domain name in its Common name, and credentials are valid.
I know that it’s reachable, and the credentials are ok, so the only thing that could have a problem is the certificate.
I remember that I needed to change the Hostname for this ESXi, but I did not double-check the domain. So I need to check the Domain name, Fully Qualified Domain Name, and Hostname.
This can be done with a simple command in the ESXi shell: esxcli system hostname get
As we can see above, I had an extra domain-subdomain from my router(which was set by DHCP in the ESXi install first boot), and the initial certificate was using the DHCP domain.
So I need to set the proper domain with: esxcli system hostname set –domain vmwarehome.lab, generate new certificates with /sbin/generate-certificates, reboot, and try again.
After rebooting ESXi, try again to validate the ESXi host, and all is green. This means that VCF did not find any configuration errors in the VCF commission checklist criterion.
ESXi host is validated and now ready to be added to VCF.
Again, this simple blog post shows another example: sometimes, a simple solution is enough to fix a problem that can take many hours to troubleshoot.
Other VCF errors blog posts:
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