In the past few weeks, I had been hit by many calls of many of my colleagues & customers being hit by the following error when trying to configure VMware ESXi HA:

“cmd addnode failed for secondary node: /opt/vmware/aam/bin/ft_startup failed to complete within three minutes”

After investigating the error for sometime & searching on the internet I found many misleading trial and error solutions for this error around Google results. The resolution which seems to work for everyone of my colleagues & customers is below.

1- Disable HA for the affected cluster

2- Delete the User Worlds Swap file called uwswap from all the nodes in the problematic cluster.

3- Enable HA for the affected cluster again.

Note: If its possible to move the uwswap file to the local harddisk do it by all mean, as its much better than putting it on the shared storage & will save you a lot of headache.

Recommendation: Add all the host short names & fully qualified names to the host files of all the ESXi servers in that cluster. If you have a doubt on how to do so let me know & I will make a post on how to do this :) .  <== Well as many requests had hit my mailbox the following link is another article I posted on here to show just that:

VMWare ESXi editing the Hostfile

I thought I will document this as I am sure many of you will hit it one day or another. I hope to save all you of you some time resolving this issue. I would appreciate if you leave me your feed back