Power on VM Fails - "Could not power on VM : Not Found"

[IconSolutions]

Hi Guys and Girls,

I am running a relatively small server with ESXi 4.0.0 running a SBS 2008 Standard VM as well as a couple of XP VMs for legacy line of business apps.

Today one of the disks in the RAID-6 went offline and was replaced, after checking the RAID integrity and rebooting the server ESXi appeared to load normally and could be connected to via vSphere.

I noticed that the SBS guest had not started where the XP guest had.

I attempted to manually start the VM and recieved the following error message at 95%:

"Could not power on VM : Not Found. Failed to power on VM"

In the server events the failure is listed as:

"Cannot power On on localhost in ha-datacenter. A general system error occurred:"

Alas I am new to ESXi and most of the support is handled by my hardware supplier who is currently unavailable.

I have tried removing the VM from the inventory and re-listing it without success.

All files appear intact on the datastore.

Any assistance with this would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Tom

[admin]

Did you try searching our Knowledgebase on this problem? It could be a number of things and there are several articles that may help you.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/

Rick Blythe

Social Media Specialist

VMware Inc.

[DSTAVERT]

Did you have snapshots? Look through the vmware.log file(s) in the VM directory. Download from the datastore browser.

[danm66 · Accepted solution]

I would try creating a new VM and configure it to use the existing harddisks from your SBS server. Perhaps the .vmx got corrupted??? The vmware.log file in the directory that the VM is located might give more information about what it's not finding. Use the datastore browser to download the file to your w/s.

[IconSolutions]

You were pretty close to on the money Danm66. We ended up connecting a SATA drive to one of the motherboards ports and connecting it as a datastore.

After copying the .vmdk files accross to the SATA datastore we could add them to a new VM and it spun up without issue.

On a side note, we tried creating a new VM with the .vmdk files from the RAID and it still failed, so we tore the RAID down, rebuilt the set and reloaded the .vmdks. Just goes to show that no matter how much hardware redundancy you build into a machine the unexpected is always lurking.

[JLackman]

I'm sitting here looking at the exact same situation. Error is "Could not power on the VM : Not found. Failed to power on VM"

All files on data store are intact.

Tried creating a new VM from the .vmx, same error.

Tried creating a new VM (new .vmx) and adding the existing drives, same error.

One guest on this same datastore WILL start, but of course the one we really need won't.

Other symptoms point to Hard Drive issues, perhaps we'll test IconSolutions approach.