vCenter appliance stuck on “Requesting Information” when joining domain

I tried joining my freshly installed vCenter Server appliance to the domain and it was stuck on “Requesting information”. Rebooted, tried again, same results.

Then while rebooting I looked at the console to see if there were any error messages. Noticed some messages about certification errors and SSL handshakes failing. Then I remembered I had changed the appliance name from the default to something else, and also assigned a static IP etc. The renaming wen’t fine, but could it be that certificates had to be regenerated manually with the new name?

Sure enough, yes! In the appliance go to Admin and change the radio box for “Certification regeneration enabled” to Yes. Reboot, and now you’ll see messages on the console indicating that certificates are being regenerated due to a name change. Login, try joining to the domain, and now it works!