Had to shutdown VCSA 6.5 in our environment recently (along with every other VM in there actually) and upon restarting it later I couldn’t connect to it. The Web UI came up but was stuck on a message that it was waiting for all services to start (I didn’t take a screenshot so can’t give the exact message here). I was unable to start all the services via the service-control command either.
The /var/log/vmware/vpxd/vpxd.log file pointed me in the right direction. Turns out the issue was name resolution. Even though my DNS providing VM was powered on, it didn’t have network connectivity (since vCenter was down and the DNS VM connects to a vDS? not sure). Workaround was to move it to a standard switch and then I was able to start all the VCSA services.
Later on I came across this KB article. Should have just added an entry for VCSA into its /etc/hosts file.