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vSphere 8: Error Installing HA components failed

·257 words·2 mins·
Author
Christian Mohn
IT veteran, podcaster, author, and blogger from Bergen, Norway.
VMware vCenter vSphere HA Screenshot

Errors when enabling vSphere High Availability (HA) in a cluster
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Enabling vSphere HA in my homelab resulted in the following errors being displayed in my vCenter Web Client:

Cannot complete the configuration of the vSphere HA agent on the host. 
"Applying HA VIBs on the cluster encountered a failure". 
Failed installing HA component on the host: 
host-34 An internal error occurred while staging/remediating the host.
A general system error occurred: 
Installing HA components failed on the cluster: domain-c8

A quick search returned Configuring vSphere HA on an image-based cluster fails (384913) but that didn’t quite sit right with me, since HA was previously enabled on this cluster, and no changes had been done to the image based vLCM setup I use.

The only change I had done, was to remove a host that had failed from the cluster. As part of the process of removing the failed host, I had also tried to mount the local NVMe device from the failed host to the host HA had issues with enabling the HA Agent on. Then it dawned on me, when mounting the NVMe device I had stopped the USB Arbitrator service on the host in question, on order to mount the NVMe drive via an USB enclosure.

Logging back into the host via SSH and restarting the service with /etc/init.d/usbarbitrator start solved the issue, and I could enable HA again on the cluster without issues.

TL;DR
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The USB Arbitrator service not running on an ESXi host causes issues when enabling vSphere HA for a cluster.

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