Virtual Machines not detected after new ESXi Install

[mickleroy]

Hi,

I must say I've really enjoyed working with ESXi but I'm running into a little issue at the moment.

I've originally installed ESXi 5 on an SD card and created several virtual machines through the vSphere Windows Client. Due to the SD card becoming detached on reboot (using a Dell R610), I've now decided to install ESXi 5 on a USB drive. However, when I open the vSphere Windows client, I do not see the virtual machines under the host but I can see they are still present in the VMFS datastore I created previously. When I boot from the SD card, they appear just fine.

Do I have to migrate them somehow?

Thank you for your help!

[pratjain · Accepted solution]

As it is a new ESXi Install you can register the virtual machines from the datastore as the inventory.xml on the new installation might be empty.

Steps to register virtual machine using vmx are available on kb http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006160

[mickleroy]

Thank you for the quick reply.That worked perfectly!