Cannot Contact Host in vCenter 8

Cannot Contact Host in vCenter 8

Recently I was doing some jobs in the home lab and at some point I was trying to add a new vSphere host called nuc01.cloudhat.local into a vCenter 8 cluster, but I immediately received an error:

Cannot contact host nuc01.cloudhat.local

This was a new vCenter 8 environment and a new vSphere host. I started to debug the issue using my Windows jump VM. The new vSphere host was responding to ping using the IP address, but DNS resolution was not working. I switched to my DNS server and of course, DNS records were missing for the new host. I added the missing DNS records and then I switched back to my Windows VM to check DNS resolution:

C:\>nslookup nuc01.cloudhat.local
Server:  dns.cloudhat.local
Address:  192.168.0.222

Name:    nuc01.cloudhat.local
Address:  192.168.0.111

This time it was looking good, so I went back to vCenter to retry the “Add Hosts” to cluster operation, just to receive same error: “Cannot contact host”.

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