ESXi 3.5 inventory showing all guests as unknown (invalid)

[NZSewell]

Help!

My ESXi client is showing all my guest servers as unknown (invalid).

The servers are still running OK, and nothing has changed on the ESXi server, or on the guests.

What Can I do to bring them back to the inventory which is painless (relatively) and easy?

Browsing the datastores I can see all the relevant files for each server.

Thanks

Dave

[DSTAVERT]

You could supply some more background. What does the infrastructure look like? What have you tried? Tools installed? vCenter or standalone VI client? Tried it from another workstation?

[NZSewell]

Hi

Single ESXi host runnin3 windows 2003 servers, 2 windows 2008 servers.

Running VI CLient, no Vcenter.

Tested from another workstation with same version of client (downloaded from ESXi host site). All has been good until today, but not sure when this happened, as I haven't opened the client for a couple of days...

So far haven't tried anything as I'm not sure what to try and what the consequences would be.

Thanks

Dave

[NTurnbull]

I've seen the invalid status for guests when there are spaces in the vm names in VI as it can create the directory structure on the datastore with spaces and / in the names which ESX(i) can have a problem with

Thanks,

Neil

[DSTAVERT]

Try restarting the management agents from the yellow console screen.

[Brocksampson]

If the above items from the other people do not work, when you have a chance to turn off the guest servers, back them up, then "Remove from Inventory" each guest, then go to "Configuration >> Storage >> Data-store" and "Add to Inventory' each guest. I know when I had the same issue you're outlining that was the only way I could get them to return.

[NZSewell]

Thanks, but all our servernames are a single word.

[NZSewell]

What would be the preferred method to backup the servers. All but one of them I could do the obvious and copy the files from the datastore to a storage device,, but the one server, our file server has a 1TB disk for storage, I've nowhere with enough space to put the files for that sucker...

I'll try the management agents and first and see what happens. I assume when I restart the agents, the servers continue to run? no downtime involved?

ta

Dave

[NZSewell]

Update on this.

Generally we notice that once this has occured the ESXi server will reboot on us, normally at a random time if we don't catch it beforehand and restart our selves.

The version is 3.5 the free version.

We're not looking at upgrade and migration to newer hardware, so until then I'll live with this.

Thanks

[NZSewell]

a pain in the arse, but seeing how we're upgrading shortly I'll live with it!