HA state is lost on a reboot of a ESXi host causing it to stay uninitialized

Products

• VMware

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• If the vCenter Server Agent (vpxa) and HA Agent are installed on ESXi ramdisk instead of vmkramdisk, these bundles are not persisted in the bootbank image.
• In the /var/log/vpxa-installer.log or /var/log/fdm-installer.log file, you see error similar to:
  
  Now try installing on Ramdisk.
  All done! Status: 0
  

Cause

This issue occurs if the build number of the ESXi 4.x host falls between 219381 and 392992.

If ESXi build number does not fall within this range, this issue occurs when the latest vpxa/fdm installation log entries in /var/log/vpxa-installer.log or /var/log/fdm-installer.log report Now try installing on Ramdisk . and installation completed saying All done! Status: 0

Resolution

This issue is resolved in vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1a, download available at VMware Download.

To work around this issue:

• If the host does not join back to the vCenter Server after the reboot, reconnect the host manually to the vCenter Server. To reconnect the host manually, right-click the host in the inventory and click Reconnect.
  

• If the host does not configure for HA after reboot, do a manual reconfigure for HA on that host. To reconfigure HA, right-click the host in the inventory and click Reconfigure for vSphere HA.