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davecon
Contributor
Contributor

VM disconnected after host failed - How to manually reconnect?

Hi

During some planned downtime today, i came across an issue which may cause problems in the future - so i am just looking for any insight...

We have 6 Esx hosts running Win2k3 vm's. All VM's reside on SAN storage. HA/DRS is in use and working fine.

Basically we were going through each host and shutting down VM's, then putting each host in to Maintenance mode. Each host was then restarted.

One of the host servers had a 'pink screen of death' on reboot. Since this host did not come back up, its VM shows as disconnected in Virtual Center. Luckily this host came back up after a second reboot, and its VM was able to power on. During the 'pink screen'/failed host I was unable to migrate or disconnect the VM and reconnect it on another host.

As the host was in maintenance mode, HA obviously wasnt able to migrate the vm to a working host.

My question is - If the failed host had not come back up after a second reboot, how would i manually disconnect the VM and power it up on a working ESX host? I know this can be done using cmd line, but not sure of the proccess. I cannot really play with it as its a 24/7 production system.

Obviously, i still have to find out why my server 'pink screened' but thats another days work!

thanks in advance for any replies.

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3 Replies
depping
Leadership
Leadership

just select "remove from inventory" and browse the datastore and import the vm. probably the easiest way.

Duncan

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davecon
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks

I didnt want to go and remove it in case their was a simpler way of reconnecting that i was missing!! Thanks for that, at least i can just do that if it fails again.

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JasonBurrell
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have had this happen after a purple screen and there is no ability to remove from inventory, its greyed out.  My guess is that vCenter still thinks it is powered on so it removed the option.  How do you get the VM back, and changing the name is not an option becuase its a vCloud created VM.

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