ESX 4.1 help

[scott76]

Hello,

I'm very new to VMware and have recently been trying to help restore multiple VMs on ESX 4.1. We have no remote capabilities at this point so everything has to be done via command line. In a nutshell, most everything was configured to use a SAN (which is failing) and I'd be interested in getting some help copying the VM's to run from local storage. Can anyone help get me started with the necessary commands to accomplish this? The boot process gets stuck on "Restoring s/w iscsi volumes...Enabling software iscsi", but eventually times out and continues. After this there are nonstop "sd 3:0:4:0: still retrying x after 180s" messages occurring. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - Unless you are comfortable with Linux I would recommend downloading the vSphere client form the ESX host - when say you have no remote access is the ESX host even on your network? If it is point a web browser at the host either via hostname or IP address and one of the options on the web page presented will allow you to download the client - this will give a point and click method of moving the vms from the SAN to local storage -

[scott76]

Thanks for the feedback. We had lost remote capabilities (vSphere Client, ssh, etc.) to it after a power outage. Fortunately, we did restore that capability today. Half of the VMs were on local storage, but the other half reside on the SAN (if I'm understanding this all correctly...again I'm new to this, especially SANs). The SAN datastore is no longer visible in vSphere Client, or through command line. There are some type of issues happening with iSCSI and/or LUN connection. We're still trying to figure it all out. Again, thanks for the feedback!

[Dee006]

Hi Scott,

Welcome to VMware Community,I saw the error message posted in the previous thread.I doubted it is issue with build version.Can you share your build version of esx host.

Have a try with re-scan adaptor.

VMware KB: Performing a rescan of the storage on an ESX/ESXi host

Based on the error message i found few KB below

VMware KB: Booting the ESX host fails with this message in the console: Restoring S/W iSCSI volumes

VMware KB: VMware ESX 4.1 Patch ESX410-201104406-BG: Updates mptsas, mptspi device drivers

[scott76 · Accepted solution]

The issues we've experienced is due to faulty SAN hardware. We are going with a different gameplan at this time. Thanks for all the feedback.