I recently had the pleasure of trying to change the host name and IP address of the vCenter server. The old host has two networking interfaces. NIC1 was connected to the Internet while NIC2 was connected to an internal network with IP address 192.168.30.0/24. The vCenter and the plugins were configured to use the internal IP address.

When the IP address and the hostname god changed, all kinds of problems broke lose. For example, the Update Manager Client was not able to connect to the Update Manager Service.

So, the vCenter does not detect changes in host names and IP addresses. Now, I’m used to the unix world, so I started to track down all the places where the IP address and host name are written down. It turned out that the values were used in a number of configuration files. Although grep found all of them, the Update Manager still did not work. So, I did a quick search in the registry, changing a few more variables. But, still no luck. I even tried to reinstall the vCenter client and the Update Manager Client.

After some struggling, I ended up with removing and reinstalling vCenter and all the plugins. Now, the whole process took quite some time, so if anyone have a way of solving this problem, I would be grateful if you leave a comment :-)