As some of you know I spend a lot of time on the VMTN forums, helping people out and learning from other experts. Today someone posted about Storage VMotion not working after a Service Console IP change. It reminded me of a problem I faced a while ago. The solution wasn’t obvious but fairly easy, because the problem was solved with a slightly different approach I wrote it down:

Disconnect the ESX host from VirtualCenter
Stop the VMware VirtualCenter Server service
Remove the /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg file from the ESX host that’s affected
Run this script on the database:
———–
UPDATE [VCDB].[dbo].[VPX_HOST]
SET [IP_ADDRESS] = ‘w.x.y.z’
WHERE [DNS_NAME] = ‘name of esx host as it is listed in the table’
———–
“w.x.y.z” above is the new ip address
Start the VMware VirtualCenter Server service
Add the host to the cluster again

Thanks goes out to BigRolTide for pointing me out to this solution. (In my case updating the database wasn’t necessarry)