ESXi HOST POWERED OFF

[Bunty11]

My ESXi Host was poweredoff due to power outage.

Now it is back online. How to check if there are no errors on it? Any logs to check ?

[john23]

Check /var/log/messages and sysboot logs. From Esxi5.1 /var/log/vmkernel also can be checked.

-A

[f10]

I would look at the visible symptoms first, like the following:

Is the host connected to vc

All storage Luna detected

All VMS powered on

Any orphaned VMS

Any alarms or alerts.

You can check the vCenter/hosts tasks and events tab for any issues. Also you may check /var/log/hosts.log & vmkernel.log if you suspect any issues.

Does this help?

-f10

[Bunty11]

but inside vmkernel what to check..? there are so may entries.

Do we need to search for words like "errors" "warnings" ??

[f10]

Exactly, there could be 1000 things to check but they may not be relevant so I mentioned about the logs at the end. I have spent hours trying to diagnose an error reported in vmkernel and hostd.log only to realize that they were informational messages. However you may check for errors reported in vmkernel for e.g. # grep -i error /var/log/vmkernel.log and similarly you can use the same command for hostd.log. You can also check for any warning in the logs but like I said earlier, use the easy approach first and then look into the logs.

Enjoy reading the log files

-f10

[JarryG]

What exactly you have in mind with "powered off"? Correctly shutted down, including all VMs? Or simply power interrupted? The first case is quite normal, nothing to worry about. But if your ESXi-server was simply turned off while all VMs and ESXi were running, then you can expect anything up to complete loss of data on your datastore. AFAIK vmfs is not so robust to survive sudden power outage...

You could use VOMA (vSphere On-disk Metadata Analyzer) to check datastore for inconsistency (and later similar tools inside of VMs), but I would nor rely on it. If this happened to me, I would reformat datastore and restore VMs from off-line backup.