ESX 3.5: Configuring for HA errors

I recently upgraded to ESX 3.5 on a test system, and had an issue that was really stressing me out. The issue was that each time I would perform the “Reconfigure for HA” task, I had errors causing the task to fail and the new ESX host sits there with a red triangle like a car broken down on the side of the highway. The log message that runs in the Virtual Infrastructure Client was largely useless, so I jump into the VMware ESX database. For this situation, I have looked into the VPX_EVENT table and saw the following event:

Event_Type
vim.event.HostShortNameToIpFailedEvent
Host_Name
ESX-35-DEV-001.AMCS.TLD

This message gave me a starting point and I found that in my service console network configuration the DNS suffix order was not the same for all hosts. Specifically, I forgot one DNS suffix in the order and that name made sense to me:

Therfore, the takeaway is when building ESX servers, ensure the configuration for all hosts in a cluster (or datacenter) within Virtual Center have the correct configuration where relevant for DNS, subnet mask, interface naming, and storage configuration.