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davecon
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Host disconnected, unable to login even at console?

HI

Hopefully someone can help me out on this one....

I have a HA cluster of 7 ESX 3.02 hosts. 1 x vm per host, all running in production environment (24x7).

One of my hosts (ESX07) has lost connection to VC. (appears as disconnected). I have tried disconnecting but VC returns an error "unable to acces the specified host".

I can ping the ESX and i get full reply.However i cannot ssh/putty into it. I have also tried to login at the console but the login prompt does not accept a password - it just sits at login!

I would just reboot the box, but i have a VM running on it which i cannont shutdown. At the moment the VM is still running fine, as has been for over a week!.

It would seem the Host is hung somehow, but i have no way of doing a mgmt-restart or i cannot migrate off the VM as the VC will not allow it while host is disconnected.

I have also tried to access the ESX host webpage but that is not working also.

Basically i need to know - Is there any other way i can vmotion the VM onto another box, while the Host is disconnected from Virtual Centre?

At this stage i am thinking my only solution is to rdp into the VM and do a clean shutdown, and then power it up on another host.

Any suggestions?

Many thanks for any help

Dave

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Cameron2007
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you will have to unregister try some of the commands listed here Smiley Wink

http://www.esxguide.com/esx/content/view/2/25/

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Cameron2007
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you could try connecting to the datastore and readd the vmx file to another host then you should be able to manage the VM from VC

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jkumhar
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Hi,

Can you try to connect with the help of winscp and then do the ftp to the ESX host?

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davecon
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Hi

Thanks for the quick replies.

If i try to see teh ESX host from Winscp or Veeam Fastscp it just times out - it cannot connect.

In the datastore browser i can only Delete the VM or add to inventory - but will that do a shutdown or a vmotion on the vm?

thanks

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Cameron2007
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no it won't shut the VM down all that it will do is allow you to manage from another ESX host

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davecon
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Thanks for the replies.. I will try this tomorow and let you know how i get on.

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davecon
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I have tried to re-add the VM to the inventory under a different name, but it fails with an error saying the 'the specified key name, or identifier already exists'?

the original VM is still listed in the VC and is running, but is listed as disconnected.

Again, any help is appreciated!

thanks

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Cameron2007
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you will have to unregister try some of the commands listed here Smiley Wink

http://www.esxguide.com/esx/content/view/2/25/

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davecon
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Thanks for your help. In the end i managed to cleanly shut down the vm and quickly restart it on another host.

Now i have to find out why my host failed and disconnected. I will try and get more use out of the commands, which admittedly i dont like to mess with them at the moment!

Points awarded for the help.

thanks

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ronmanu07
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check that there is no other *services.* in the directory "/etc/vmware/firewall/services.xml" if there is remove it and do - 'service mgmt-vmware restart'. this will start vmware-hostd and all is good!

Let me know how u go!

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