Crazy Error: VMware Infrastructure Web Service at “http://localhost:8222/sdk” is not responding

This morning, I had to add some patches to my VMWare server (yes, I need to move over to ESX), and needed to reboot. Upon bootup, when trying to get into the Virtual Infrastructure management console, I was presented with the ominus error message “The VMware Infrastructure Web Service at “http://localhost:8222/sdk” is not responding (Connection Refused).”.

Not sure what it was, and assuming it was a kernel problem (which I did install multiple kernel patches on my Suse machine, I downloaded the latest release of VMware server and installed it. The vmware-config.pl script ran into a couple of errors as well. The Internets came up with a few results:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/176054
http://www.stknetwork.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=77:vmwareserver-error-sdk&catid=41:configuration-examples-misc&Itemid=76

However, these are all related to VMWare server running on Vista 64. Mine is a 64 bit OpenSuse Linux machine. The solution to the Windows problem was to add a localhost entry to the hosts file. Well, I had a host file and had no problem with it previously.

I then tried to telnet to localhost:8222 and it bombed, but telnet to 127.0.0.1:8222 worked fine. I double checked, and lo and behold, I no longer had the localhost:127.0.0.1 entry. Once I added that, I reran the vmware-config.pl and restarted vmware, and voila! it worked!

SO – lesson is, make sure you have the above entry in your /etc/hosts file!