vSphere HA fails with error - Cannot complete the configuration of vSphere HA agent on the host. "Applying HA VIBs on the cluster encountered a failure"

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• vSphere HA fails on an ESXi host in an image-based cluster.
• vSphere HA Configuration fails with the following error:
  
  Cannot complete the configuration of vSphere HA agent on the host. "Applying HA VIBs on the cluster encountered a failure".
  
  
• vSphere HA reconfiguration task on vLCM image-managed cluster fails with the error:
  
  A general system error occurred: Installing HA components failed on the cluster: domain-c#
  
  
• Error in /var/log/vmware/vmware-updatemgr/vum-server/vmware-vum-server.log

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.468+07:00 error vmware-vum-server[591832] [Originator@6876 sub=VumVapiAsyncTelemetryFilter opID=0Xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxd] [TelemetryVapiProvider 74] Method com.vmware.esx.settings.clusters.software.recommendations.get failed with: Error:
-->    com.vmware.vapi.std.errors.not_found
--> Messages:
-->    com.vmware.vcIntegrity.lifecycle.recommendations.NotFoundError<Recommendations cannot be found.>

• Cluster image is configured with firmware addons/firmware and drivers, and the host is marked as not compliant.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.x

Cause

Hardware Support Manager is not configured correctly, and a Firmware and Driver addon was not added to the Cluster Image, due to which the compliance check fails.

If the compliance check fails, then the host can't be remediated against the image, and does not attempt to install the FDM VIB on the ESXi host.

Resolution

• Check the cluster image for 'firmware and drivers', and ensure that the Hardware Support Manager is configured correctly (vSphere client/vCenter will have a plug-in for the respective hardware support manager).
• If the hardware manager plugin is not present, then remove the firmware and driver configured on the single image configuration from the cluster and validate the image.
• Re-run the Check Compliance task in Image compliance (Navigate to the cluster, then select the Updates tab)

Additional Information

Firmware information is not available because there is no Hardware Support Manager configured for the cluster.