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Thibault
Contributor
Contributor

ESX host console hung VM's running need to unregister and register VM's on functioning host

I have an ESX server which I can not SSH or log directly into the local console. There are VM's that are still running on this host. I realize I will probably need to reboot this host but that will take some scheduling effort. For the moment I would like to unregister this VM from this host and register the VM on another host. We can RDP to the guest VM and shutdown the VM. Can I from another host however unregister that VM and how...Keep in mind No VirtualCenter access, VI client access, putty or direct console access to wounded ESX server..thanks

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Without any of those access methods working I do not know of a way to unregister a VM - I think you going to have to reboot your ESX host -

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Thibault
Contributor
Contributor

I would think that there needs to be a way. HA must do this somehow when a host dies. IF I power off the VM at the O/S level would that make a difference?

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

With HA it is not the host that dies the initiates anything - it is the master HA agent on the remaining hosts that  intiates the failover.

Shutting down the VM would protect the VMs O/S and filesystem form any damage - so if you have access to the VMs I would do that and restart the ESX host

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Thibault
Contributor
Contributor

I agree that shutting down all of the VM's would be nice but I am in a situtation where optimimally if I could get this one off of this host to another I could schedule outages for the remaining (change control, etc. not ideal in these situations). It makes sense that other hosts take care of the unregistering and registering in an HA event which is basically what I want to do. I would like to from a running host unregister a powered-off VM and then register on the host that I have putty'ed into. That would make my life much better right. Thanks for discussing this with me I areally appreciate your feedback..

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bulletprooffool
Champion
Champion

Thibault,

Can you RDP your clients?

If you can shut down your VMs from within the OS, VMware will identify that they have bene shut down and marked the VMs as down.

You can then remove your ESX host from your VC's inventory and re-import the guests back into your estate (they will still exist on the downed ESX host though - so make sure to remove them from this as soon as you power the host back up)

One day I will virtualise myself . . .
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