I came across a strange issue today while working on a vCloud Director project. My vSphere Host had an error, “The Host Spanning configuration on this Host “hostname” is not up to date,” and I wanted to fix this. It suggested I repair my configuration, but of course “Repair Host” was greyed out. So, I disabled my host, and still couldn’t repair my host due to the option still being greyed out.
The problem seemed to only get worse…
I “unprepared” my host, which removes the vcloud-agent from the host, but I still got the error that while it was unprepared, the host spanning configuration could not be accessed.
Once I had the host unprepared, I was actually unable prepare the host again. This didn’t make much sense, but I was now getting the error “Host “hostname” is Powered Off.” I did, at one point, receive both error messages at the same time:
Well, I knew my host was powered on and could communicate with it otherwise. The simple fix? I placed the host in maintenance mode and gave it a reboot. Once it came online and was out of maintenance mode, I was able to prepare it in vCloud Director without issue, and my “Host Spanning” error did not reappear.
In conclusion, this very well could have simply been a communication issue between my vSphere Hosts, the vCloud Director Cell, the database, and vCenter Server in which time may have solved (I heard other sources say to just “give it a minute”). I did also try “Reconfigure for HA,” in the vSphere Web Client, which succeeded, but did not solve my issues (but proved communication existed in my environment). It also could have been something I broke another way while messing around in the environment. Either way, hopefully you never see it, but if you do I hope this helps you. If I ever get curious, I’ll try to reproduce it for you.
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