2 ESX hosts, one VIC. All on same subnet, very basic network setup.
The other day I inadvertantly broke the networking on esx1. I ended having to "rebuild" all the network config on it for it to talk on the network at all. I recreated the vSwitches, re-IPed the vswif, added all the portgroups, etc. I can now talk to the ESX host and can run VMs on it, however VI cannot talk to VMs that are on it. When i go to open a vm console I receive "Cannot connect to host my.esx.host.com: no connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it." But the VM is pingable on the network and exists as a "regular machine" - VI just cant connect to its console.
As far as i can tell the network settings are identical on each esx host. esx2 works fine and i can talk to VM consoles on it from VI. esx1 has the correct route and "route -n" shows the same thing on each host.
I hope i've explained this well enough. Thanks for any input.