/tags/vcenter/ Recent content in Vcenter on Susan Khanal Hugo en-us © 2026 Susan Khanal Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/installing-vcenter-server-8-vcsa-and-clustering-3-esxi-hosts/ Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/installing-vcenter-server-8-vcsa-and-clustering-3-esxi-hosts/ <h2 id="-problem">🧩 Problem</h2> <p>I wanted to bring my 3 separate ESXi hosts (running on local storage, no shared storage/NAS) under centralized management by deploying vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 8.0.3, then clustering all 3 hosts together.</p> <p>Along the way, I hit a persistent firstboot failure that took significant troubleshooting to root-cause:</p> <pre tabindex="0"><code> Error The supplied System Name &lt;hostname&gt; is not valid. Resolution If the supplied system name is a FQDN, then make sure the DNS forward lookup results in at least one valid IP address in the system. If the supplied system name is an IP address, then it should be one of the valid IP address(es) in the system. </code></pre><p>This happened with <strong>both</strong> <code>vcenter.local</code> and <code>vcenter.lab</code> as the FQDN, despite DNS appearing to be configured correctly.</p>