ESX host commissioning validation fails with an error"<ESX Host FQDN>: Host(s) already present in inventory, validation failed." in VCF 9.x

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager / VCF Installer
• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

• VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) administrators may encounter a failure when attempting to commission or add an ESXi host back into the SDDC Manager inventory after the host has been re-imaged.
  
• Adding the host to the SDDC UI fails with the error :

  "<ESX Host FQDN>: Host(s) already present in inventory, validation failed"

  
  
  
  
• The host still remains visible in the Assigned Hosts list:
  

Environment

VMware Cloud foundation 9.x

Cause

• The ESX host commission validation fails because the previous host decommissioning was incomplete, leaving a footprint of the ESX host with the same FQDN in the SDDC database.
• To identify the stale host entry, execute a query against the host table in the SDDC Manager platform database to locate the duplicate FQDN with an unexpected status or ID mismatch from previous failed decommissioning tasks.
  
  platform=# select id, hostname, status from host;
                  id                  |       hostname        | status
--------------------------------------+-----------------------+--------
 <Host ID>                            | <Working Host FQDN>  | ACTIVE
 <Stale Host ID>                      | <Stale ESX Host FQDN>| ACTIVE

Resolution

The recommended solution is to manually clean up the failed stale ESX host entry from the SDDC Manager PostgreSQL database using a series of DELETE statements across multiple tables followed by restarting SDDC Manager services to fix the issue.

Directly removing the inconsistent host entries from the SDDC Manager database resolves the underlying data inconsistency, clearing the ESX host from the Assigned Host list and allowing the host commissioning process to succeed upon a retry using same FQDN.

Contact Broadcom Support request to resolve the issue as the resolution steps involve updating the SDDC database.

Additional Information

Commission ESX Hosts

Decommission ESX Hosts