High Availability errors when upgrading vSphere cluster with Image Profiles

When migrating to a new version of vSphere (in this case from vSphere 7 to vSphere 8) and using image profiles in combination with new hardware, you will get and error that the hosts cannot join the HA configuration. The errors range from “Unreachable” and “Retrying” to “Operation timed out”.

We ordered new hosts to replace our old ones and took the opportunity to directly update to vSphere 8. So, we installed the new hosts with vSphere 8 and added them to the existing vSphere 7 cluster. This is a supported situation for migrating to a new version of vSphere. However, with the introduction of image profiles, there seems to have been a change in how HA handles the cluster election.

When looking at the HA configuration we see that adding the new hosts has failed and that the status is “Retrying”.

Trying to solve this problem by selecting “reconfigure HA” on the hosts or disabling and enabling HA on the cluster, didn’t work. And as we were in the middle of the migration, we just wanted to move our VM’s to the new hosts and solve the HA problem later. Unfortunately, this was not possible because the migration wizard doesn’t allow a vMotion when HA is not configured on the host.

So, we where back to solving the HA problem first. Taking a closer look at the events when trying to add new hosts to HA, we saw that there was a check if the new hosts were compliant with the image profile. As the image profile is vSphere 7 and the new host has vSphere 8, this would always fail.

Luckily there is a simple solution to all this, but it is weird that VMWare didn’t take this migration scenario into account, or at least document the new way to migrate to a new vSphere version with new hardware.

Just follow the following steps to complete your migration/upgrade:

1. Disable HA on the cluster
2. vMotion your VM’s to the new hosts
3. Remove the old hosts from the cluster
4. Update the image profile to reflect the version of the new hosts
5. Enable HA

Daniël de Zoete

Started his working life as a system manager at a health care organization. Is now a dedicated technical consultant at PepperByte. Specialist in virtualization and security.

Core qualities
Eager to learn, punctual, fun, loyal, patient

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Socializing, watching television series and sports

Job description
Technical Consultant