Host Missing from vCloud Interface

We’re currently running a little in house beta at the office of vCloud 1.5.0. The testing has been going on for a while and recently I had to do something I didn’t want to do, but had a nice learning experience for me so I thought I would share.

We have two UCS blades running in our vCloud environment giving us a nice healthy test bed to play in. For another maintenance in our VMware environment, I had to steal one of these blades to be used in another cluster to add some resources temporarily. So into the vCloud interface I go to disable the host, unprepared the host and finally remove it from the interface. No problems, everything went as expected and I could move the host into the other cluster for the maintenance.

Where the issue came into play

So, maintenance goes off without a hitch and I can now move my host back into the vCloud cluster. Move it back over in vSphere and go back to the vCloud interface under the Provider vDCs -> Manage and Monitor -> hosts. Uh…doh! My host isn’t showing up.

I try taking it in and out of maintenance mode, out of the cluster several times, nothing.

Finally, I restarted the vCD.

Eureka! We’re back in business. Right click on the host and hit Prepare host and we’re up and running again on our two hosts.

WHile I wouldn’t recommend randomly restarting the vCD service all the time, this was one of those instances where I could quickly do it in our beta environment and it gave the vCloud environment the kick in the pants it needed to recognize the host to be put back into action.