I recently encountered an error in VMware vLCM: “Feature cannot be enabled on this cluster”. This was followed by another message: “Failed to fetch vSAN witness host associated with the cluster.”

After some troubleshooting, I decided to take a different approach. Since the second error mentioned issues with the witness host associated with the cluster, I opted to deploy a new witness host.

Once the new witness was deployed, I navigated to the failure domain settings of the cluster to replace the old witness with the new one. Oddly enough, this action resulted in an unknown error and failed. However, the cluster automatically reverted to the previous witness configuration—and, surprisingly, vLCM started working again.

From a technical standpoint, I can’t pinpoint exactly what resolved the issue. Nevertheless, attempting to replace the witness host appears to have addressed the problem.

PS: The warning in the first screenshot related to “VMware Cloud Foundation” puzzles me. The cluster isn’t associated with VCF, so I have no idea why that showed up.