At the same client site where we had the problems with VMware Update Manager and ESXi we are now struggling with HA. We can NOT get it to work and even WMware support can NOT get it to work either. We have been on the phone with VMware support for almost a week now and have tried various fixes but none of them work. We created a hosts-file to rule out DNS problems, we added advanced HA settings like ‘das.allowNetwork[n]‘ and ‘das.allowVmotionNetworks‘, we created new clusters, checked FT_HOST files and deleted all host from the cluster to build it again from scratch. All without positive results.

HA keeps whining about disabling HA because there was a problem. Then today we got a break, VMware support informed us that HP release a faulty batch of USBs. With this batch of green USBs configuration information may not be retained after a reboot when running VMware ESX Server 3i USB Key Version 3.5 Update 1 or Update 2 on certain HP ProLiant Servers. So we spend days on a problem which seems to be a hardware failure. I hope we will fix the problem with the new USBs but I’m very irritated that there was no info on this problem. So hereby my contribution to the VMware ESXi USB community :D.

How you can see/we saw that our USBs where faulty?
The problem with the USBs occurs when booting ESXi just after the kernel is loaded, a quick error message appears with the text “cannot mkdir /var/xxx“. This means that one or more folders cannot be created.

Hope this helps…….