"A general system error occurred: Installing HA components failed on the cluster" while enabling HA on a LCM managed cluster

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

While enabling HA on a cluster, get the following error:

"A general system error occurred: Installing HA components failed on the cluster"

With the HA task log in vpxd, the following error can be found.

"com.vmware.vcIntegrity.lifecycle.EsxImage.MetadataDownloadError"

Environment

VMware ESXi 7.x
VMware ESXi 8.x

Cause

The ESXi server under the cluster has wrong DNS server configured, so fails to resolve the vCenter FQDN to download files from vCenter.

Resolution

Refer Identifying issues with and setting up DNS name resolution on ESXi Server to ensure a working DNS is configured.