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wemnael
Contributor
Contributor

Migrate esxi 5.1 installation to another hard disk

I'm having issues with one hard drive -'witch is the hard disk where I installed esxi server 5.1... I'm getting errors like Lost connectivity to device .. also I expected very high wait on this hard. Now I would like to install ESXi to another disk but I dont want to loose my configuration and machines... How could I do this, because I would like to preserve my settings and do not want to have 2 instances of esxi on same server (because of errors that could appear)?

Thannk you

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aacjao
Contributor
Contributor

Can deploy VMA to backup your host configuration.  Spin up another disk and storage VMotion to it.  Install ESXi on the new disk.

Or you can completely backup ESXi and VM's rebuild and restore all from backup.  Either way, best to have redundancy to avoid issues like this.

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Texiwill
Leadership
Leadership

Hello,

This post has been moved to the ESXi forum for better assistance.

You  cannot really reinstall ESXi onto another drive of the same host,  however if you are using shared storage you can install ESXi on another  host and migrate your VMs (using the import method). However, if you  only have one host, then you can reinstall ESXi but do so not  overwriting existing VMFS volumes.

You really need to  find the root of the latency issues. It looks like you are running everything on one or more local disks. If everything is  on one set of disks, your disks cannot handle the number of VMs you are  running. In this case it would be best to power off VMs or storage vMotion the VMs to another location until the  problem goes away. To use Storage vMotion you may have to spin up another host.

Disk latency is not uncommon and better balanced use of your resources is required.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, 2010, 2011,2012

Author of the books 'VMWare ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise: Planning Deployment Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2011 Pearson Education. 'VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment', Copyright 2009 Pearson Education.
vSphere Upgrade Saga -- Virtualization Security Round Table Podcast

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
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