After patching our vCenter Server recently we were no longer able to use the "Search Inventory" box to search our virtual infrastructure. When we tried we would receive the following error:


Login to the query service failed. Unable to connect ...


The full error text has been abbreviated.

Have you been pulling your hair out trying to get a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine deployed from a vCenter template to join a Windows Active Directory domain? Fear not, the solution is at hand and is realtively simple.

After reading the following thread on the VMware Communities site:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/251925

I found out that one needs to use the FQDN of the AD domain and NOT the NetBIOS name of the domain, and also the user principal name for a user with proper permissions to join computers to the domain.