During VCHA deployment, witness node or passive node are specified to be on standalone host or a different VC cluster than active node.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

This article provide alternative approach If VCHA deployment operation fails with this error.

Symptoms:
The error is message shown in UI is:
"A specified parameter was not correct: spec.pool."
"Resource pool and host do not belong to the same compute resource."
<----give a line break here because the following line is not part of the error message---->
This error message may also occur during redeploy of passive or witness nodes.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 7.0.2
VMware vCenter Server 7.0.x

Cause

VCHA deployment of the configuration where passive/witness nodes reside on standalone ESX host or a different VC cluster than active node is not supported via UI.

Resolution

Use VCHA APIs to perform deployement:

1) Cluster.deploy: Deploy Cluster Task
2) Passive.redeploy: Redeploy Cluster Passive Task
3) Witness.redeploy: Redeploy Cluster Witness Task

Set resource_pool in VchaPlacementSpec of the passive/witness node to the resource pool of either the standalone ESX host or the resource pool of the VC cluster on which the passive/witness nodes are expected to reside.

Workaround:
Currently there is no workaround.