Thursday, April 16, 2009

VI Client Open Console Attempt Fails

error connecting: can not connect to host x.x.x.x: a connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.”

Mware Communities: Getting error when opening console … is a thread that was started back in April 2006 but has it’s most recent reply (as of this writing) from May 2008. It turns out that this problem has been an issue starting with ESX3.0 and has continued across several ESX versions. It is basically unexplained. There does not seem to be a solid understanding of what conditions cause this problem. There are replies from users who have experienced the issue whether connected to an ESX host or to VirtualCenter. There is a resolution that makes it go away, however.

To fix the problem add the following line to the /etc/vmware/config file:

vmauthd.server.alwaysProxy = “TRUE”

I used nano from the Service Console to add the line to the file, and the problem instantly went away. I did not even have to restart any services. The steps for using nano to change this file are:

  1. type #nano /etc/vmware/config
  2. Add the line to the end of the file
  3. Press ctrl+x to save the changes
  4. enter “yes” when prompted
  5. hit enter to overwrite the file with the same file name