Wmware esxi 4 lost all machines and licence

[Piimega]

Hello,

during our office move to new location, our esxi 4 server lost all virtual machines and also licence.

I'm booting esxi from usb disk and i can get it started, but almost everything else is lost.

Administrator password and management ip stayed like before..

I can see virtual disks but they are about two weeks old..is there any way for me to restore this server like it was used to be? What could have caused this situation..

[a_p_]

I can see virtual disks but they are about two weeks old..

What do you mean by this? Did you try to connect the virtual disks to a VM? Most likely you have snapshots, but these are not displayed when you connect a virtual disk.

Please explain as exactly as possible what you did so far, to see what can be done to recover the VMs.

André

[Piimega]

I can see virtual disks but they are about two weeks old..

What  do you mean by this? Did you try to connect the virtual disks to a VM?  Most likely you have snapshots, but these are not displayed when you  connect a virtual disk.

Please explain as exactly as possible what you did so far, to see what can be done to recover the VMs.

André

Firstly when i noticed from vmware client that all my virtual machines was missing, i though my vm store disk are not recognized by motherboard, so i maked sure they are ok.

After that i changed my management console ip and configurations (new dns etc because of new office) but no old virtual machines..and no licence.

After that i had to get some of my old virtual machines running, so i created new virtual machines and configured them use old .vhd files, but after that i notied all data is old..we have all our source code (svnserver) running on virtual machine..but i can manage that by restoring reporotories from backup..

I'm just wondering is it even possilbe to restore situation like it was before..without data loss because...last time esxi was online before moving our office was 31.8 at 15:15..and about two weeks ago i took manually snapshot from every virtual machine.

[EdWilts]

I would start by looking at your license.  If you were running with a free 60 day trial and it expires, everything will continue to run but you can't power on any guests.  Since you did an office move, your ESXi host was powered down.

Ensure that you have a valid 4.x license.

[a_p_]

I can't tell you why the configuration got lost. However, to bring the VMs back to the inventory you only need to right click the vmx file in the datastore browser and select "Add to Inventory".

Since you created a new VM and pointed to the base disk you actually lost the snapshots (~1.2GB for the first disk and ~12GB for the second disk). If the VM didn't run a long time and no major modifications have been done (e.g. modify files, restore from backup, ...) we could try to repair the disk chain to have the VM run from the latest snapshot again. However, you will most likely end up with at least some data corruption.

If you decide to stay with the current state and restore the missing data from a backup we should clean up the now obsolete files to not get into troubl in the future.

André