VMX connection handshake failed for mks
Today I ran into an interesting error when trying to access one of my VM.
First I could not get into that VM remotely as it appeared as offline. This said, VI showed the VM as healthy and online.
Trying to get to it using the Console from VI showed the following error:
As you can see I was afraid that some of the SAN path were down or some kind of painful problem with the SAN. No, no a quick ssh in showed that the mentioned volumes were online, accessible and all SAN paths were up.
So I do power off and restart the VM: no success. Restart the ESX (after vmotioning all VMs): no success.
Eventually I find that in the settings of the VM, there was a reference of some floppy image pointing to a volume (not even on the same volume). I changed that option to Client Device and voila everything was back to normal.
Looking that information up on the VMware KB or community forum doesn't provide any solution.
ESX4 HA error
I only played with ESX4 regular flavor so far and I wanted to try mixing them with ESX4i. However trying to put that host in my cluster would give me HA error.
Enabling HA gave the error:
"Cannot complete the configuration of HA agent on the host. See the task for details for addional information. "
Without much details I was almost ready to blame it on ESX4i. However after checking everything I found out that my DNS servers settings were wrong.
Changing my DNS to the right IPs and HA configuration worked like a charm.
Obviously my sticky keys did not help but of course stressed out the reminder that HA relies on DNS heavily.

KitKatNeko