• It appears my default NIC vmnic0 used for vm-traffic and vmkernel - management got lost or destroyed in the process of adding the host to the VEM/DVS

• Although I tried restoring the standard switch it keep holding the IPaddress of vmnic0 and the physical console would not allow me to configure anything on the management network

• I restored it once more and the same thing happened. I waited overnight and this morning the management network was associated to a different NIC that was actually a vmkernel interface for vmotion

• Now it would let me configure the NICs again. So, I added another network cable to an available NIC set it as the management interface and gave it a new IPaddress

Once I did that I was able to get connected remotely and start restoring things as they were.

One lesson learned is all my storage traffic is iSCSI / NFS although the vmnic0 interface for management and vmtraffic was toast the " Storage " network was still working and the VMs were powering on. I thought we had vmotioned the VMs off to another host in the cluster but, I guess not. We could not manually add them to a host since they were getting locked by the other host. Could have left the broken host powered off and that would have released them.

WP