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kellino
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Orphaned Template

Not sure how this happened, but all our Virtual Center templates are now "orphaned". The only thing I can think of is that our hosts were removed from a cluster and then added back in. All the VM's are fine, but we just lost the templates which are on the same datastores.

In any case, it seems that there is no solution for orphaned objects and that they must be removed from the inventory. I can do this, but then how do I import then back in?

Thanks!

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55 Replies
Gene_H
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We just hit this issue on Tuesday. Restarting the services did not correct the problem. In fact, it actually orphaned an additional template! We had to do the "remove and re-add" process on each template to correct this.

Gene

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Mork
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Exactly the opposite! I had to restart my VC earlier tonight for a completely different reason, and it fixed the two templates I hadn't gotten around to removing and adding yet...

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mowgus
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Same problems here as well. Has anyone had a definitive answer from support?

I noticed VC 2.0.2 has been recently released (build 50618). No mention of this bug in the release notes that I can see: http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/releasenotes_vc202.html

I will perform the upgrade soon enough however and see if it gets better.

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Lance_Womack
Contributor
Contributor

banaszyb - thanks for the detailed instructions, very helpful...

so i just spent a bunch of time looking thru the logs from last week trying find what the vmware tech d00d showed me as to what the culprit was as to what was causing my VCB backups to fail.... but i can's seem to find what i was looking for...

but, on the first two attempts at running a VCB backup i noticed in my Virtual Infrastructure Client that ALL of my vm servers were show as "Disconnected"..., and i think they were greyed out, this cleared up within a few seconds.. but was i was told was that the "server" restarted. some daemon with the esx server restarted, there was no core dump , but the main daemon restarted. it happened twice and then everything was cool.

sorry i don't have the log info for some real info but probably this is what is happening for others because now my templates are orphaned

if i can find the log output i'll post it.

lance womack

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Fulcrum72
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Has anyone tried out VC 2.02 and ESX 3.02 yet? I'm wondering if that little "upgrade" will fix this little annoying problem...

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vic10us
Contributor
Contributor

Just upgraded our 32 blade server farm to ESX 3.0.2 and VI 2.0.2 from 3.0.1/2.0.1.

We just started to have issues with orphaned VM Templates after the VI upgrade. A simple re-register of all the orphaned templates seems to fix it.

One clue as to why this is happening, after the VI upgrade the agents on all the ESX servers are updated but in the majority of the installs I am hearing reported (by friends and colleagues) this process fails 90% of the time on the first attempt.

This even after following the instructions of making sure that HA is disabled and that all the ESX servers have the /tmp/vmware-root folder prior to upgrading.

I recommend one additional preparatory step, restart the mgmt-vmware service via "service mgmt-vmware restart".

anyway that's my two cents. Smiley Happy

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frond
Contributor
Contributor

We ran into the same issue and opened a support case with VMware on it. They said that this is a known issue and that engineering is working on it. They said that the bug report was fairly recent (August 16 2007) so they haven't had much time to work on it so far.

They also mentioned an additional side effect that I hadn't noticed. If you restart the VC service to fix this problem, you create a new problem. The little green, yellow, and red dots in the "status" column go blank for all of the virtual machines. I guess the fix for that is to restart the VC agent on the hosts, but that seems to be the cause of the templates going offline in the first place...

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JWC
Contributor
Contributor

Ran into the same problem. I tried the work-around of removing from inventory and adding to inventory but that was a tedious process.

I restarted both the SQL Server service and the Virtual Center Server service on the Virtual Center server and I got all the templates back.

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frond
Contributor
Contributor

I just got an update on our support case. VMware says that they'll fix this in Virtual Center 2.1.

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Walter_Ring
Contributor
Contributor

I just ran into the same problem with ESX 3.0.2 and VC 2.0.2

Restarting the VC Service cured the problem.

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PerfectPhase
Contributor
Contributor

They also mentioned an additional side effect that I

hadn't noticed. If you restart the VC service to fix

this problem, you create a new problem. The little

green, yellow, and red dots in the "status" column go

blank for all of the virtual machines. I guess the

fix for that is to restart the VC agent on the hosts,

but that seems to be the cause of the templates going

offline in the first place...

Same here, from time to time I lose all the status lights on my servers and the only fix is once the ESX hosts have booted is to run:

service mgmt-vmware restart

But that then orphans my templates, so I restart the VC service and I lose all the status lights.......

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EcioBNI
Contributor
Contributor

Same problem noticed today here, restarting the VC service fixed the problem.

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CWedge
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I just talked to tech support this is a confirmed bug in 2.0.2!

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ben_jam
Contributor
Contributor

Just to add.....

ESX 3.0.2 / VI 2.0.2

Noticed templates disconnected... could do nothing with them - right click, all options grey except for Add permission... odd. Could not remove from inventory, and could not re-register. Tried restarting VC service - resolved problem for XP templates, not W3K templates.

And yes - the missing status lights as well.

My solution....

Disabled HA and DRS

Disconnected host

Removed host from cluster

Re-added

Fixed all problems of templates and status lights. Additionaly, for the other host with no templates, I only needed to disconnect and reconnect to get status lights back (caused by the VC restart).

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gunas
Contributor
Contributor

I had the same problem today with one of my Templates on VC 2.01.

Restarted the VC service solved the problem.

Thank you guys Smiley Wink

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AlbertWT
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hi All,

There are so many ways to solve this problem, i think mine was caused by the Storage VMotion to iSCSI SAN even when this VM still got access to the old ESXi ISO folder and then somehow when i convert to template it worked fine.

But not from template into a VM, the way i solved it is just by renaming .VMX into something else and then the conversion process went fine Smiley Happy

now ican switch back from Vm to template and back without no problem.

hope this helps.

Kind Regards,

AWT

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