vSphere Replication Error: The virtual machine VM has failed validation and cannot be configured for replication: Host is not connected

By | March 14, 2016

As part of our vCenter upgrade plan, we wanted to re-install the vCenter on a Windows 2012R2 box but re-use the SSL and the database by following the following KB.

During the re-install, my team forgot to bring the SSL certs over. Once vCenter was up they noticed that all of the hosts were disconnected. They used a script to reconnect the hosts (unfortunately I wasn’t there to know what that was). What I did have to fix was SRM and VR. SRM wasn’t connected so I did a Modify Install on the SRM server which then reconnected SRM to vCenter.

VR was a little trickier. When you went to VR in the web client, it wouldn’t load any of the management or monitoring windows. This tended to indicate that VR would need to be rejoined to vCenter. At first I tried to update this field without powering off beforehand.  I also tried to change the file on the VM that contained the vCenter info. The problem was that the information was cached somewhere, everytime you hit save and/or test, it would used the cached information.

I read that VR reads the OVF info on power on so I powered VR off then powered back on. I then logged into the VAMI interface (https://vrserver:5480) and then updated the vCenter name and clicked save. This was successful.

The last step was to test if VR worked. I tried to configure a VM for VR but I would get the error in the web client: The virtual machine VM has failed validation and cannot be configured for replication:  Host is not connected

When looking in the web client, the hosts all looked disconnected even though you could get all of the info and manage them just fine. It seemed very superficial. In the thick client all of the hosts were connected. So somehow the web client had the hosts as disconnected and VR was reading that. Support had me do a services.sh restart. I also tried disconnecting the host in thick client and reconnecting the host in the web client. My last ditch effort was to re-install the web client. None of that worked, but my colleague thought of something simpler: restart inventory service. After he did that, the hosts showed ‘connected’ in web client and VR worked!

Hopefully if you run into this situation this post will save you some time.

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